I did some work for a major Australian Federal government department. They had a very secure environment and couldn’t (well, wouldn’t) allow webservices or anything else of that nature between themselves and other government departments. However, they did allow for email.
Luckily the ITSM system I had took incoming and outgoing email. They had a stored procedure “hook” for email. I reimplemented the SLA functionality by inserting the relevant data into the database, calculated the SLAs via the procedure.
And it’s comparatively one of be simplest and most reliable transports for business data exchange.
In my first professional job, we used PKI-encrypted email as a transport for ebXML messages (order, despatch notifications, etc) between our customers ERP system and their suppliers. And in my most recent role, we received retail transaction data and returned analytics reports via email.
The great thing about protocols like this is that virtual all enterprise systems support them in one form or another. And it’s always been easier to get clients to set up exchanging data via automated emails vs SOAP or REST APIs.
Luckily the ITSM system I had took incoming and outgoing email. They had a stored procedure “hook” for email. I reimplemented the SLA functionality by inserting the relevant data into the database, calculated the SLAs via the procedure.