Effective and affordable business process integration is a key concern in the finance industry. A large German joint-use centre, supplying services to 237 individual savings banks, enhanced the integration capabilities of its core banking system, consisting of more than 500 complex functions, through aggressive use of Web services. Advanced requirements such as heterogeneous client environment, sub-second response times, 300% traffic growth, and interface complexity did challenge today's Web

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... vices implementations. To achieve true interoperability between Microsoft (MS) Office™/.NET™ and Java™, and to implement more than 500 Web service providers in a short time frame were two of the most important issues that had to be solved. The current, second release of this solution complies with the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) Basic Profile 1.0. Leveraging the Basic Profile reduced the development and testing efforts significantly. This report discusses the rationale behind the decision for Web services, and gives an architectural overview of the integration approach. Furthermore, it features the lessons learned and best practices identified during the design, implementation and rollout of the solution.