The idea is great. The implementation has been challenging. We have explored the decoupling and writing almost everything ourselves and for the most part that has worked without much work and complete control by our developers. I have written and been involved with writing a number of asynchronous processes over the past decade and am well versed in web services and asynchronous batch processes that run on triggers or timers. They are very handy.

One or more posters also mentioned that there is the XML issue to deal with. And I agree that it is an issue. However, with a little research and experimentation you can find some very rich tools for working XML into a friend and not a problematic foe. Consuming web service output is not as bad as the wrap some give it. XML is different but it is not that hard. Creation of appropriate schema for large data collections over a large consortium of users is much more of a challenge. But once the schema is decided the use of it is not that bad.

That all said, the use of service brokers is good, and if you use something like MSMQ or write a similar process yourself it can give you a great advantage in how your processes perform.

M.