Management Summary

This thesis has been developed through a cooperation of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences Winterthur and the Company Swiss Re within the framework of the course of study Communication Systems and Informatics.

The Client/Server architecture has established itself in the current IT infrastructure, whereby Microsoft is a market leader on the Client side and Unix on the Server side. The most important application should now be that Microsoft Office should, as Internet Client, call up web services and have access to Enterprise Java Beans. For reasons of compatibility, we have implemented a solution using the platform-independent SOAP-protocol.

Using a prototype, we have studied the following aspects such as interoperability, stability, performance and security. We used Open Source products by Apache on the Server Site. As part of Office XP, we were able to integrate various web services into Excel.

The main theme of this work lay in the Web Service Security, in order to implement the coding and authentication. The security is based on certificates and asymmetric encryption processes.

The communication between Client and Server, as well as the interoperability functioned perfectly. The performance levels are within the area expected by us for SOAP. As Web Service Security is firstly in draft form, questions relating to compatibility and standardisation remain open for the immediate future.