I have been following the WSRP story from a distance, likening the idea but realizing that it would be very hard to make it happen. WSRP stands for Web Services for Remote Portlets and is an OASIS spec you can read more about here. The idea behind WSRP is to create a standard for interactive, presentation-oriented web services. Simply said, it means that WSRP producers (like a vendor of an ERP portal - take SAP) can expose parts of their portal interface (really the presentation of it), expose it as a Web Service in a specific format as defined by the spec, and then have it consumed by any WSRP consumer (like SharePoint). Since it is all about Web Services, we automatically should have platform, vendor and language independence.

Sounds great? Well yes, it does, but it seems that most vendors are very interested in becoming a WSRP consumer but not really going for the investment of building WSRP producers. Why not? It is all about making business. As Doc Holladay is stating in his recent post: "What incentive do business application content providers that also sell a portal have for creating WSRP producers?  For example, say I sell an ERP app that holds mission critical data and I also sell an enterprise portal why would I make it just as easy to expose all my content into someone else's portal?"  Do read the rest of his posting since it contains other statements why he claims that WSRP is losing the battle. Anyway, it is good to hear that Microsoft internally decided that they will make WSRP consumer support available for the next version of SharePoint.