An intelligent queue may be used to facilitate communication among a set business application programs. In one embodiment, the intelligent queue may interact with a variety of business application programs providing consistent service behaviors across a variety of data store products. The intelligent queue provides extended message storage, efficient journalling, interoperability with other intelligent queues, load balancing, once-only processing, as well as detailed message state information that tracks the status of each message from both the sender and the recipient's perspective.