XML web service everything or not?
Yesterday I had a lengthy meeting with our sister company as it appears I'm going to serve as the (sole?) developer of an enterprise wide intranet using MS Sharepoint 2003 and lots of custom web parts.
This sounds like a great challenge but will work smoothly for our side because our shop is all Microsoft with Active Directory, ISA Server, SQL Server, a IIS6 Webserver, Sharepoint 2003, and a Red Hat box running some legacy PHP/MySQL solutions I coded 2 years ago and some file servers (pretty much all these servers running on Windows 2003) so we have a great simple setup that allows a single login setup (the PHP uses IP address ranges for security, which isn't housing anything very important anyways). The headache is that our sister company runs 3 different LDAP directories: Novel based, Lotus Notes based and a MS Active Directory server which makes single signon impossible plus I have to decide how to authorize their users to our Sharepoint setup.
It seems our best solution is for them to setup a certificate server on their side and allow our setup to trust their certs. After that, they need to code some XML web services via their J2EE setup while I code mine in ASP.NET and you can bet your bottom dollar I'll be finished before them :P
Now the real point of this post.....
Should I over architect my solutions? A couple of the solutions will very likely have more use than simply an ASP.NET webpage (ex: our company's phone directory could be very usefull in other webpages and windows.net applications) so this is a prime example of something that needs to be coded as an XML Web Service. But now I'm starting to consider other parts of the master intranet plan to be coded as XML Web Services.
The sane answer would be only to code the stuff that can obviously have multipurpose use and would need an XML Web Service and I think an extreme lack of time (I'm the sole developer at this company) will dictate me to choose this option... but if I had the free time available I think I would code everything as an XML Web Service.
Maybe I'm just obsessed but ever since my class, I've really been hyped about the possibilities.