Web-oriented architectures are easier to implement and offer a similar flexibility to SOA.

By Roger Smith

CIOs and system architects find themselves stymied as they try to sledgehammer complex SOAs into their enterprises. Top-down, "if you build it, they will come" approaches to service-oriented architecture often wind up failing--sometimes spectacularly. Instead of better aligning business processes and IT departments, as was promised, too many employees remain oblivious to expensive SOA initiatives. And those optimistic ROI projections? Forget 'em.

Management Strategies for SOA
By: Mike Kavis, CTO/Chief Architect, M-Dot
Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Management Strategies for SOA

The SOA consortium has been running an annual contest for the best SOA Case Studies. Last year I attended the event and summarized the common characteristics of successful SOA implementations. This year's winners shared the same characteristics:

1. Strong executive level commitment
2. Educate the business of the value of SOA
3. Establish a Center of Excellence
4. Well defined business services
5. Completeness of services

If you are writing an SMTP agent, you might find it instructive to learn to speak SMTP yourself, both to aid debugging and to get a feel for what is happening "under the hood" when Exchange receives a message from the internet. This is a lot easier than it might sound. Open the Run dialog box (press Window + R) and enter "telnet localhost smtp" (or substitute the name of your Gateway server in place of localhost). This will open a window where you can talk with the server. The server will begin the conversation by sending a banner, such as: