Services form the main components of a SOA system. But with the increase in number of services in SOA system, the complexity increases, managing these services becomes a burden.

Logging, error handling, management portal, downtime, applying patches, upgrading and versioning of services and maintaining a registry forms some of the main hurdles in smooth running of a SOA system.

The current Microsoft offering for managing the lifetime of services is not strong as compared to some of its other competitors.

Microsoft UDDI implementation i.e. Windows 2003 UDDI Services, at present still support OASIS 2.0 standard, which in its self is quite a old one.

So what to do when a company is using a Microsoft stack (BizTalk, WCF etc…) as its SOA implementation?

·         Microsoft has AmberPoint as its one of the SOA partners. Microsoft ESB Guidance has some integration with AmberPoint’s SOA Management system. This looks to be quite good, still have to evaluate its cons and pros.  From the first look, it provides much functionality like Service Repository, monitoring etc.

·         BizTalk forms the core in Microsoft SOA stack. Also it is one of the main tools for ESB implementation using Microsoft stack. The Microsoft ESB Guidance has some cool components for the same. The ESB Guidance, has some good examples on integration with SOA Software. You can find some more details here.

·         The other option is using Systinet now HP.

Microsoft should also have some plans for upgrading its UDDI implementation to OASIS 3.0 standardJ.