The concept of a service-oriented architecture is a powerful tool for simplifying enterprise integration. Following the three principles of modularity, encapsulation and loose coupling will achieve some amount of improvement for an individual service. It is insufficient to have a loose set of principles to guide enterprise architecture designs. It is also important to have "best practices" on how to build, run and manage enterprise systems. This document will cover the best practices that have been culled from Epiphany, a number of Epiphany's top customers and leading analyst firms.
