The Global XML Web Services Architecture (GXA) was an announcement by Microsoft in 2002 of several proposals for extensions to SOAP

SOAP

SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...

. Some of the components of GXA were developed into standards in combination with other companies, including IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

. Others were specific to Microsoft and have been superseded. Microsoft released a reference implementation of a part of GXA as Web Services Enhancements

Web Services Enhancements

Web Services Enhancements is an add-on to the Microsoft .NET Framework which includes a set of classes that implement additional WS-* web service specifications chiefly in areas such as security, reliable messaging, and sending attachments. Web services are business logic components which provide...

 1.0 SP1 for Microsoft .NET (WSE).

GXA Future Directions

At the time of the GXA announcement, Microsoft listed further standards they were participating in developing:

Federated security: WS-Trust

WS-Trust

WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure...

, WS-Privacy, WS-Federation

WS-Federation

WS-Federation is an Identity Federation specification, developed by BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA Inc., IBM, Layer 7 Technologies, Microsoft, Novell, Ping Identity, and VeriSign...

, WS-SecureConversation

WS-SecureConversation

WS-SecureConversation is a Web Services specification, created by IBM and others, that works in conjunction with WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-Policy to allow the creation and sharing of security contexts...

, WS-Policy

WS-Policy

WS-Policy is a specification that allows web services to use XML to advertise their policies and for web service consumers to specify their policy requirements.WS-Policy is a W3C recommendation as of September 2007....

Pervasive metadata and discovery: WS-Referral

Microsoft also announced they were working on distributed agreement (transaction) standards.

Further reading

GXA (Global XML Architecture) at serviceoriented.org

GXA Defines Framework for Web Services from Directions On Microsoft, Sep 23 2002