Strengths and weaknesses of WS-BusinessActivity for cross-organizational SOA applications

In traditional database-driven applications, transactional integrity is a well-established concept. In order to apply these techniques to SOA-based applications, along with the capability to perform long-running business activities, the WS-BusinessActivity standard was developed. This standard does not specifically address cross-organizational use, however, when an enterprise decides to integrate its SOA-based system with their business partners' services, the ability to span long-running business activities across organizational boundaries becomes crucial. This paper describes an experiment performed to assess the suitability of WS-BusinessActivity for cross-organizational use and identifies several strengths and weaknesses that became apparent during its execution.