SOA Software Adds Prebuilt Governance for Microsoft .NET, WCF 
SOA Software is taking a lot of the headaches out of running SOA governance for Microsoft infrastructures. The company’s latest offering comes loaded with prebuilt and pretested, governance-ready services, clients, tools, policy, and documentation for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
SOA Software is taking a lot of the headaches out of running SOA governance for Microsoft infrastructures. The company’s latest offering comes loaded with prebuilt and pretested, governance-ready services, clients, tools, policy, and documentation for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
SOA Software’s latest offering is “a ready-to-use Microsoft SOA toolset, designed for nearly instant deployment,” said the company’s CTO Alistair Farquharson. “With a simple startup experience, the WCF 6.1 Agent ready-to-use governance package becomes the foundation for education, training, and best practices – ultimately a springboard for complete governance of a Microsoft SOA infrastructure.”
“The key aspect of this latest offering is that without a lot of added work, Microsoft customers don’t have to do configuration or custom development to get their WCF into governance,” Simon Barere, SOA Software’s senior systems architecture told IDN. “For many in IT, governance can be challenging. So, we have reduced that level of effort and complexity to get them from a core Microsoft environment to a strongly governed Microsoft environment.”
Under the covers, SOA Software’s latest package helps customers quickly provision some 18 common governance use cases, using just a couple of clicks. Use cases include Kerberos, X.509 security, NET.TCP, NTLM and WsHttpBinding. It works with a wide range of environments, including Windows 2008 or later, .NET 3.5 or later and WCF (6.1), Barere said.
To eliminate the complexity of enacting runtime governance, SOA Software engineers virtually took a page out of the playbook for how Microsoft tools work.
“For Microsoft features, many customers were able to be productive in 10 minutes or so,” Barere told IDN. “So, we wanted to give customers the same experience in how they set up governance. That meant that we made it possible with just a few mouse clicks, users can run many governance tasks.”
To use the product, customers simply install SOA Software’s Policy Manager and its software “agent” will auto install into the Microsoft infrastructure. IT staff then simply import Microsoft services into the SOA Software Policy Manager’s registry, which automatically attaches industry standard policies to those services.
A company’s policies are imported as part of a service definition, Barere said. “Policy Manager helps with policy configurations and we also ship added policies,” he said.
SOA Software’s governance “agent” also supports Microsoft BizTalk applications exposed as WCF services and native NET.TCP binding. Other ready-to-use enhancements include: automated certificate provisioning; an enhanced logging framework; improved operational alerts; and Oracle database connectivity for Windows Server-based Web services.
To enforce governance for these services and operations, SOA Software also deploys a “delegate” on the client side.
SOA Software engineers got the idea for adding a library of automated SOA governance features from customers. “When we talked to customers, we quickly saw how we could make their daily life easier when it came to governance,” Barere said. “They saw the value of governance, but they felt getting it done was taking them a lot longer that they wanted.”
Barere said he is particularly excited by SOA Software’s out-of-the-box native support for NET.TCP, which he called “an optimized, but fairly complex protocol” to work with. “NET.TCP offers some very cool features, especially when you’re looking for high speed,” Barere said. “But, it’s not a protocol that a lot of people are familiar. Our support makes it easy to use it, and that is very cool.”
The latest offering lets Microsoft users have confidence that they are governing Microsoft SOA elements either on their own – or as part of a heterogeneous enterprise SOA environment, Farquharson added. The company’s Unified SOA Governance Automation also makes services on WCF, BizTalk, and ASP.NET visible to and compliant with policies across IBM, SAP and other platforms.
SOA Software’s most recent update to its Repository Manager offers improved integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 as well as Team Foundation Server 2005, 2008 and 2010. This allows .NET devs to search for, investigate and consume services directly from Microsoft tools while automatically bringing those services managed by Microsoft Team Foundation Server into SOA Software's platform.
