The document discusses an Employee Self Service (ESS) application created using Oracle SOA, portals, and JD Edwards for the construction company Thiess. ESS allows employees to maintain their personal details stored in JDE and integrates with a third party payroll system. Key points: 1) ESS was initially a Java web application later converted to portlets for use in a portal. This conversion caused some functionality issues. 2) ESS integrates with an external payroll system using file-based FTP integration for importing/exporting employee data and payments. 3) Testing the integration was difficult due to lack of real-time web services from the third party and performance issues when importing large amounts of