My Feedster Research Service

My current client is currently undergoing the zone transfer into the web services zone. Initially, they were looking for some help to pick the right approach to introduce web services into their organization. By now, they are very fired up about web service technology and find that web services and SOA solve many of their problems.

The initial project goal was implementing a process-focussed, web services architecture to bridge a back office systems and off-the-shelf enterprise packages using .NET, Axis and even PHP, but we soon discovered other areas where Web services would help solving problems.

Another area we investigated was the option to provide content via a Research Web Service that plugs into Office 2003 and Internet Explorer. These services plug into the research pane in IE, Word, Excel or Visio as shown below.

 I found the idea quite appealling and now I started putting together a little office research framework. My first experiment resulted in a research service for the blog search site Feedster. If you're interested, you can register the service here. Once I did some more code cleanup and wrote some more samples to show paging and ASP.NET forms authentication, I'll put the project up on gotdotnet.

In the mean time: Enjoy Reseaching Feedster.