This session will challenges of the U.S. government’s migration from paper-based processes to complete SOA solution integrated across agencies and external partners – a transformation awarded the Best Organization SOA Application by the Federal CIO Council’s Service-Oriented Architectures Community of Practice. Critical to success was the use of open source and open standard technologies. Included in this is rule-based document handling as well as extended rule directed business processes. Converting backend manual review processes to an automated workflow dashboard with knowledge driven document intelligence to assist the staff and researchers. This system is now successfully deployed with ability to handle thousands of application submissions a week, resulting in up to 10 gigabytes of data flows weekly. The lessons learned in managing open source and open technology as well as aligning and leveraging both batch and real-time online tools with desktop applications will be highlighted. Knowing how to exploit the power of XML integration technologies is also crucial. Culture shift for the in-house staff also has to be managed – and the experience of providing help desk support to external partners.