Hi all!

We are planning to provide .net web services to our partners. As I am new to
web services technology, I have some questions concerning data exchange and
interop.

As most of our partners work with PHP, Java or classic ASP we need to be
sure that our services can be used from these languages - is this possible?
What is the best way to exchange data between the systems (input parameters
to our methods as well as return values)? We would like to work with custom
.net classes, but these won't be suitable for partners using e.g. PHP. On
the other hand we like to provide a rich functionality to partners using the
.net framework.

Is there a kind of authentication machanism for web services? Our partners
should "login" before they can use the web services.

Regards

Markus