Buenos Aires SaaS Technight: overview

Last Friday Roberto Schatz, Ramiro Iturregui, Matias Woloski and I introduced SaaS at Buenos Aires Microsoft HQ.

Audience was mainly ISV’s, some of them already implementing SaaS ideas and looking for more guidance.

After making an introduction of the main ideas (the long tail, architecture challenges, etc.), we role played LitwareHR demo (one guy from the audience played "Contoso’s" CEO role and another one "Fabrikam’s") and we showed some "behind the scene" code details and diagrams.

After finishing, architects and developers from the audience came close to make more questions so the discussion went on.

Some feedback received by the end:

• People who went to see what is SaaS: now have less doubts, with more information to get their organizations involved.
• People who went to get some SaaS implementation guidance:
  • liked the xaml activation approach for dynamic business processes: many of them haven’t used WF and some said they would use LitwareHR xaml activation code as reference.
  • focused their questions on critical data isolation and dynamic business processes
  • one ISV told Matias they implemented datamodel configuration by the use of views for retrieving tenant’s entity data (like in LitwareHR), but discarded it due to performance issues. After reading the multitenant data architecture article they implemented a "separate schema" approach (each tenant data in separate tables) with a database pool.