[Note added on 12/2/2005:  I’ve noticed a fair amount of views on this post lately, and while the early primer isn’t horrible, the SOA Cheat Sheet I did for PSGroup is much better!  Go to this post].

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an important IT architectural strategy that is changing how software is developed, used and sold. You can use SOA for simple integration, to augment existing applications, to assemble new applications, and even as a springboard to break through the restrictive bounds of traditional application development to what we refer to as business scenario development. (In business scenario development, IT business solutions will be compositions of services, business events, and business processes mirroring the interactions (or flow) of your business.)

To be successful with SOA, first you need to understand what services and SOA are. From there, you need to adopt solid service-oriented practices in order to build a deep services catalog and implement an extensible SOA environment.

[NO LONGER AVAILABLE] In our newly published SOA Primer, we focus on the beginning, with the basics on services and SOA.