In the current economic climate in Germany, few businesses are expanding, and many IT budgets are frozen. However a significant new development is the privatization of Labor-sector job brokering. The task of successfully and cost-effectively matching out-of-work citizens to available jobs has previously been performed almost exclusively by the German Federal Department of Labor. The report of an independent commission in 2002 pointed the way to a future where this system is at least partly privatized, and the re-elected Schroeder government has pledged to implement this proposal. This will open up a tremendous potential for new business in information technology.

Service providers seeking to expand their operations in this new sector face a myriad of challenges. Above all, they need a business strategy that can meet the Department of Labor's current and future requirements. Any B2B integration solution must work seamlessly with the Department of Labor's platform, as well as overcome system barriers ranging from legacy systems to PC systems to voice and multimedia integration.

MicroDoc needed a way to design a new system architecture with modularity, flexibility and platform independence. The Online Job Portal and Call Center Application -- powered by WebSphere and DB2, and developed in WebSphere Studio Application Developer -- is key to achieving this goal.

To solve our customer's B2B integration dilemma, MicroDoc built a common application-building framework in three layers.

• The bottom layer is MicroDoc's persistence framework (MPF/J), which accesses an IBM DB2 database and takes care of the object-to-relational mapping and type conversions.
• Above this layer is a small transaction framework that implements abstract classes that, in turn, help implement business transactions.
• The third layer consists of input/output objects powered by WebSphere Application Server for business transactions. They are flat, serialized objects that can be used from Java Server Pages and Web services alike. They constitute a uniform interface to utilize business transactions in a variety of architectural scenarios.

IBM Web services changes the way a Labor-sector service provider does business in at least two ways.

• Firstly, employers looking for qualified candidates can fill out help wanted ads online at their own convenience, rather than having to personally contact service center personnel. Not only does this allow for 24x7 ad collection, it frees up staff formerly occupied with administrative tasks to concentrate their efforts on helping those looking for work.
• Secondly, newspaper and magazine publishing goes much more quickly. Web services enable customers and business partners to automatically update their employment information, eliminating more than two weeks of production time for each issue of a publication.

The Online Job Portal and Call Center Application, powered by WebSphere and DB2, makes process-oriented data available to all partners involved. It enables the Labor service provider to find and add more customers in the future, and to integrate a nearly unlimited number of partners into its current system.

This successful MicroDoc project is featured in the IBM jStart technology portfolio. jStart is an IBM initiative to help customers gain from early adaptor experience.

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