Finally got the latest revisons of our service deployed this evening.  I forgot a COM+ setting and had to fix that just now, but I think all's well.  Famous last words.

It's a shame that my employer doesn't seem to want to open up our services more.  The problem is that they see hits on our mainframes; this costs us money.  Right now what we have gives you everything a travel agent could do on our system, so clearly you don't want to just open up the system to random users, and most users wouldn't know what to do with that anyway.  I like what google did: lower the barriers to use and limit the number of hits.

The other screwy thing about this industry is that you have to be a travel agent to be our customer, and that's a big barrier to entry.  Plus the travel agent community has been in decline for years; commission cuts started back in 96 or 97 and now agents get paid nothing for the most part.  Management is always talking about growing the business, wouldn't it make sense to lower the barrier to entry?