Since 1994, we have designed and prototyped several industrial messaging services over different platforms. Our experiments have been based on the ISO-MMS standard and TASE.2. This paper describes lessons learned from these projects, and some of our activities in designing the next generation of industrial messaging services. Faced with the fast changing world of communication protocols, a stringent requirement for these services is to be easily adaptable to new protocols (ONC-RPC and CORBA in the past, now SOAP/XML). Recent software engineering research introduced the notion of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to cope with such a need in adaptability. This paper demonstrates the viability of this approach in addressing our requirement.