SaaS Workshop at Microsoft, Redmond

We spent three days with a mix of theory and practice on Software as a Service.

The hosters: Fred Chong, Gianpaolo Carraro, Erik Weis and me.

The consumers: microsoft internal employees and ISVs.

Day 1

• SaaS Ecosystem: Gianpaolo presented the different players in SaaS.
• Multi tenant architecture principles: general architecture principles like data, workflow, security and provisioning.
• Multi tenant data architecture: Fred Chong talked about the famous paper about the different approaches.
• Hands on Labs: Data model extensions

Day 2

• Consuming SaaS in the Enterprise: where is the enterprise fits as a consumer
• SaaS Hosting Platform: the idea of a multitenant platform where ISV can plug applications
• Monetizing SaaS: how you can protect and license your SaaS app. The guys from SecureLM (that was acquired by Microsoft) have a great product.
• Hands on Labs: customizing workflows using Workflow Foundation

Day 3

• Securing SaaS application: Fred, the "security guru", presented different approaches about identity and federation in the context of SaaS
• Hands on Labs: creating security token service to manage authentication and authorization
• Hands on Labs: provisioning a tenant on IIS, ADAM, SQL Server

People found the labs very in depth showing the latest technology and how that applies to SaaS. Specially the ones about workflow and security. That means that the team at Southworks did a great job!