There are currently many coexisting protocols for data exchange and messaging which support different tasks, however an established standard sufficient for all tasks does not yet exist. This is becoming an even more challenging problem, as the increasing need for collaboration and messaging (e.g. in e-business) is confronted with rapidly changing technologies and messaging requirements. In order to overcome this problem, we present a layered architecture which separates the protocol-level from the task-level and embeds protocols within interface-less, adaptable layers. Furthermore, we dynamically construct protocol-stacks and allow the use of multiple different protocol combinations in parallel. Therefore, this architecture is easily adaptable and extendable and supports a very flexible exchange of protocols which we consider to be an important step towards efficiently managing rapidly changing requirements and easily adapting to future developments.