Thoughts on SOA Governance

Some advice when it comes to the creation process of (web) services for a SOA platform:

1. Only create services from core business logic/funktioality. Where is an overhead in terms of work requiered creating and mainatining web services so focus on the ones most important for your business

2. Bigger is better. Only the really big services qualify as SOA services for reuse througout a company.

3. Don't make a services per function. Again, bigger services with mony functions is easier to reuse and maintain.

4. Document each service separately from other development documentation. That makes the documentation of the service more accessible to its users and to people whating to make changes later on.

5. Create unique SLA's for each web service. The reason is that each web service may be used in different applications with different requirements.

When it comes to management of SOA I believe it's a good idea to separate creation from maintenance of services. I suggest you separate SOA governance in two parts:

1. Create services - The initial decision when you choose what will be a SOA web service and what doesn't is taken by the company's IT architecture board.

2. Change management of services - When a service is changed it may affect others, therefore a Change Control Board for SOA is necessary. That board controls any changes in webservices and they prioritize the development work.

© Copyright 2008, Tomas Elfving

SSO between a MOSS and a Weblogic web site

The problem

I need to set up single-sign-on between two web sites. The new site is in MOSS 2007. I am migrating to the MOSS-based site from the existing old site that is built in BEA Weblogic with a SUN One web server in front. The MOSS site requires login. The existing site contains applications requiering login (using the Weblogic realm). It is too expensive to migrate the entire site to MOSS at once, so we need to do a migration in several steps having both the old and the new site in production during the overlapping time.

Proposed solution

I am considering IFrameing the existing applications into the new MOSS-based site while migrating them one by one. The problem is that I cannot expect the user first to log on på the MOSS-site and then to logon to the IFramed applications residing on the existing Weblogic site, so we want SSO between them. I am considering using ISA Server (or maybe another Access management product) to achieve this. With ISA Server the both servers need to be in the same domain and use the same Web listener. I think the solution looks good on paper, but the devil is, as always, in the details. I'll write more on this when I have tried this out in reality. If You have any experience on something similar, i'd appreciate any comments on this!

© Copyright 2008, Tomas Elfving