IT strategy of businesses is moving towards leveraging Web Services and SOA. Service Oriented Architecture utilizes web services and defines how to integrate and implement services that deliver usable services in a distributed environment transparent to the end user. In the initial phase, web services were based on client/server type of interaction exposing specific methods (currency conversion, units of measurement conversion, verifying address, etc) to the end user across the internet. This is changing into a more distributed architecture involving intermediaries as well.

With the introduction of SQL Server Integration Services beginning with SQL Server 2005, Microsoft introduced the Web Service Task into its integration toolset. With this task it is possible to create a SSIS package to expose the web service. This tutorial describes a step-by-step method to create a SSIS package containing a web service task. The web service used in the tutorial will be discussed first. This will be followed by describing how the package is configured using the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. The Visual Studio 2005, The SQL Server Express (not used in this tutorial), and the Information Services 5.1 are all installed on the same machine with the Windows XP Media Center Edition Operating System.