Service-Oriented Communication (SOC) is a new development in the industry to enable communication through web services and SOA. SOC is to make communication as service and provide a service-oriented architecture to integrate communication in business applications. Recent advances of web service and SOA have made it possible for a full web service and SOA based communication paradigm over IP. This paper is an overview of the recent development in this area with a focus on key technologies that can be applied to web service enablement of communication. In particular, we discuss the generic web service based application session management based on WS-Session, the two-way full duplex web service interaction framework, and the development of Web Service Initiation Protocol (WIP). WIP is a full web service and SOA based communication protocol for multimedia and voice communication over IP. The generic web service approach of WIP overcomes many limitations which would be otherwise difficult to achieve in non-web service based communication methods used today. In addition, we discuss the service composition and orchestration framework based on WS-BPEL, and illustrate the application of this approach through some real use cases.