To attract and retain customers, hosted service providers must be able to deliver the newest, most exciting services quickly and easily. Not all Web services are well-written or have the level of semantics necessary to be able to support a commercial environment. Microsoft created the Connected Services Framework (CSF) to provide these advantages to service providers. As part of CSF, the Well-Enabled Services (WES) guidelines enable you to build services that have the required features to be provisioned, billed, and managed such that the required level of service can be profitably provided to the end consumer.

This kit explains how to use a Well-Enabled Service to integrate CSF with the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS). By integrating CSF with MPS, service providers can:

• Create new services cost effectively
• Use third-party services more readily
• Easily bundle a collection of existing services to create composite services

The service aggregation capabilities of CSF are particularly important because they allow the service provider to gain competitive advantage by integrating services into a unique service offering.

Please check Microsoft Hosting Solutions for Service Providers frequently for updates to the Connected Services Framework Integration Kit.

CSF enables you to decrease time-to-market, provide better provisioning and management capabilities, and lower total cost of ownership by following the guidelines for designing Well-Enabled Services.

For a service to be "well-enabled," it must:

• Provide a Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0-compliant provisioning interface for service resources.
• Provide management interfaces to access and manage resources (provisioning models, health models, and usage models).
• Provide event-based information that can be applied to service billing and health.

You can find more information about WES guidelines at Building Well-enabled Services.

CSF is based on a service-oriented architecture and on XML Web services, thus providing a flexible service delivery environment accessible to third-party developers. Connected Services Framework (CSF) 3.0 is designed to aggregate services that support the Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 service extensions. For more information on WSE 3.0, see Web Services Enhancements.

As shown in the following figure, this kit includes a number of Web services that integrate CSF with the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) and enable the provisioning of the hosted applications and services available in the Microsoft Solutions for Hosters. These Web services are compliant with the Well-Enabled Service (WES) guidelines, allowing for rich integration with CSF.

Figure: CSF and MPS integration

More information on CSF is available at . If you need more detail on CSF, or to engage with the CSF program, please contact your Microsoft account manager.