A service is a more formal and comprehensive way of communicating than a notification. A party requesting a service from another party must first identify itself to the other party, and can expect a meaningful reply back. For example, requesting an order status for a given order number from an order management system.

Aware IM allows defining services for intelligent business objects and using these services in a business space. For example, sending payment details to a payment processing system for completion of the payment. Service discovery is a feature that helps the configurator in defining services for objects communicating via a standard channel.

Since a business space is an intelligent business object, the configurator can define services that the business space provides to other software systems via standard or custom channels.