Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

Life Before Web Services

Did life exist before web services? Undoubtedly so. Even today, most portals deny themselves the benefits of web services. In the pre–web services architecture, the lack of a standard communications infrastructure was a major hurdle for data exchange within as well as between organizations. Organizations used a number of different hardware and software solutions, there was no common protocol or data format, and there were many proprietary data stores. Although electronic interactions between companies were cumbersome to create and maintain, they have existed for quite some time in various forms. The Internet, and the many technologies that have been developed for the Internet medium, have slowly helped businesses find ...