Enhanced Security standards for web services finalised

OASIS, the international standards consortium and its members have approved WS-SecureConversation version 1.3 and WS-Trust version 1.3 as OASIS standards. These standards bring new degree of security for web services communications. Application that communicate and share messages using web services framework (like SOAP, WSDL) can use WS-Trust to obtain and exchange security credentials either directly or through third party and use WS-SecureConversation to establish and maintain extended secure session.

Among the industry leaders – IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems have verified successful implementations of WS-SecureConversation and WS-Trust in accordance and eligibility for all OASIS standards.

More info: http://www.oasis-open.org/news/oasis-news-2007-03-27.php

Microsoft Customer Care Framework – Single view of customers

Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF) is a great solution for organisations with call centre backbone. It is the framework to integrate disparate line of business (LOB) systems and provide single view of the customer enabling better customer experience and reduced operational costs.

It is almost a day-to-day experience for most of us when we are slapped with duplicate invoices or marketing communications and the reason for such instances is disconnected systems to support customer relationship management. Organisations are still struggling to manage these systems in an integrated manner due to proprietary technologies and substantial investment being made. This is where Microsoft CCF framework really helps. It allows a degree of abstraction from complexities these systems by building integration layer and glues them together to make customer contact operations and experience seamless.

You can get more information about the solution at http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/solutions/ccf.mspx