WEBDAV and Web Services Interoperability

Greetings,
 
    Congratulations Ms. Dusseault on your new book.  I have a copy and
it has saved me hours of spelunking time.  I wish I had it two years ago
when I first embraced WEBDAV........
 
    We are a small software company in the document management space.
We are upgrading our existing server and I have strongly suggested to
upper management that we use the WEBDAV protocol as the 'interface'
(sorry) to our server.  In a previous life, I developed a server that
supported the WEBDAV protocol including a small subset of DASL and am
aware of the benefits of utilizing WEBDAV.  The owner of the company is
leaning towards the Web Services camp.  His rational for using Web
Services is that an integrator using our document repository can "drag
and drop" our service into the Microsoft .NET development environment
and immediately begin integrating.  I have already overcome all of the
other business objections to WEBDAV but do not have an answer for this
one.  We have a data layer that supports our business rules and the plan
was/is to expose it first using WEBDAV then expose it via Web Service in
order to accommodate both environments.  This is a lot of work for a
company of our size.  Is there a way to expose a WEBDAV server like a
Web Service in a development environment?  I realize that WEBDAV is a
protocol and as such does not support discovery like a Web Service.
Since it is a standard, it does reason that the methods in WEBDAV could
be mapped to Web Services methods via some automatic conversion,
translation etc.  Any thoughts?
 
    Thanks in advance for any and all information and suggestions.
  
Steve
Team Lead
www.iDatix.com <http://www.idatix.com/> 
727-441-8228 ex29