Web Services
It is hard to imagine networked computing without the Web. The “Web services” movement leverages the advantages of the Web as a platform not only for information but also for services. Web services make up the service-oriented architecture that will give rise to the next generation of B2B, enterprise application integration, and business process management solutions. Web services will enable companies to:
Dramatically cut application development time and costs.
Simplify application integration across the enterprise.
Safely expose both data and business processes to customers and business partners, enabling unprecedented e-business interactions and collaboration.
A more formal definition of a Web service may be adapted from an IBM tutorial on the topic.
Web services complete, independent Web applications that can be published, found, and used across the Web. Web services perform a variety of functions, which can be anything from simple requests to complicated business processes. Once a Web service is deployed, other applications (and other Web services) can find and use the deployed service.
The new Web services initiative is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) whose goal is to lead the Web to its full potential as a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.
The Web services basic platform is XML plus HTTP. Behind the facade of a Web server, the XML message gets converted to a middleware request and the results converted back to XML. The full-function Web services platform can be thought of as XML plus HTTP plus SOAP plus WSDL plus UDDI. At higher levels, one might also add technologies such as XAML, XLANG, XKMS, and XFS—services that are not universally accepted as mandatory. The emergent Web services platform is really a series of “in-development” technologies. Very few software companies have released software using this technology, although one that has is IONA, whose Total Business Integration package has just been adopted by Nordstrom, Inc. to power its online retail order fulfillment process. The IONA e-business platform provides nordstrom.com an application integration platform that facilitates business collaboration transactions and enhanced online order fulfillment for greater inventory visibility.
Another emerging technical standard that is likely to impact CRM is called document object model (DOM). W3C's DOM is a platform- and language-neutral interface that will allow programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of documents. The document can be further processed and the results of that processing can be incorporated back into the presented page.
A DOM implementation (also called a host implementation) is that piece of software which takes the parsed XML or HTML document and makes it available for processing via the DOM interfaces. Companies will take advantage of the DOM as the interpretation layer for XML in the exchange with PRM, B2B, and e-CRM applications. It is more effective to translate an order as a document rather than a data string. Make sure your CRM vendor is able to handle this back-end data exchange.