Conclusion

Web services are the next stage of evolution for e-business and are the result of viewing systems from a perspective that everything is a service, dynamically discovered and orchestrated, using messaging on the network. Microsoft recognizes the importance of web services, which lie at the center of the .NET paradigm. Indeed, .NET is sometimes characterized as simply a means of creating web services.

In a web services architecture, each component is regarded as a service, encapsulating behavior and providing the behavior through an API available for invocation over a network (usually the Internet). This is the logical evolution of object-oriented techniques (encapsulation, messaging, dynamic binding, and reflection) in e-business. Many product vendors can be expected to jump on this bandwagon, providing ERP, CRM, and other solutions delivered through web services.

The web services architecture provides several benefits, including:

• Promoting interoperability by minimizing the requirements for shared understanding

• Enabling just-in-time integration

• Reducing complexity by encapsulation

• Enabling interoperability of legacy applications

For a portal, web services may be both provided and consumed. If you are an information provider, you may want to create a web service that pushes information to your subscribers and opens up your applications to their access. You may want to consume web services in the form of subscriptions for content and leverage sophisticated transactional systems that would be far too expensive to build for your enterprise alone.

Web services provide extensibility to the capabilities that are built into the off-the-shelf Microsoft server products such as Content Management Server, SharePoint Portal Server, and Commerce Server. They can serve as glue for integration with customers, suppliers, and government agencies.