Windows Azure Web Sites, Active Directory, Office 365, and Apps for Office and SharePoint Demo

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For the //build/ 2013 conference Brady Gaster, Program Manager for Windows Azure SDK, and I teamed up and put together a session around building a SaaS application in Windows Azure Web Sites that uses Windows Azure Active Directory as it user store and authentication source. Then, to the SaaS Web application, we added two “companion” apps for Office and a “companion” app for SharePoint in Office 365 and provided Single Sign On (SSO) for any Office 365 tenancy on the planet and the SaaS application. How cool is that?!

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The SaaS application scenario is built around Contoso Real Estate Listing Management where real estate agents can register and create an account on the SaaS system and manage their property listings. The intent of the demo is to show the pattern/architecture for a scalable Web application built on Windows Azure Web Sites and then what a great opportunity one has to land the SaaS data into the context of Office and SharePoint. These simply become additional views/web pages that you hang off the SaaS application. You can surmise from this demo, that essentially any SaaS or line-of-business (LOB) application could nicely be extended with “companion apps” too. In this case, we had two primary use cases for the real estate agent users of the SaaS application.

  1. For real estate agent users that only have the Office clients and not Office 365 Business (Medium or Enterprise).
  2. For real estate agencies that have Office 365 Business, hence SharePoint Online that supports apps for SharePoint is a part of their service offering. Here we also wanted to have SSO between the Office 365 tenancy and the SaaS application.

Here is the session recording: (if the viewer does not fully display, you can view here.)

 

You can view/download the slide deck here:

Enjoy!