SAAS Workshop on March 5th: don't panic!
15th February DAY 1 of 7
Richard (knows about customers), William (knows about hosters) and myself (knows about ISVs - and knew I didn't want to be alone with this!) are running a SAAS Workshop at the Architect Insight Conference on March 5th (spaces still exist - try not to be put off by this post!).
Between us we know something about SAAS - but ... not as much as we would like. March 5th sounds a long way off. But... I work a 4 day week and I have some holiday booked and I have an offsite and.... End result - I just worked out I have at best 7 days to a) become an expert and b) get the workshop sorted. Panic set in 11 minutes back - my solution - share the panic, then (hopefully) move on. (I will ignore for one moment that during those 7 days I also need to work with my ISVs on stuff nothing to do with SAAS)
I thought it might be fun/different to share how those 7 days get used:
Day One
- Panic - done that
- Richard and I flesh out on back of a fag packet the workshop overview
It is tempting to leave this until later but we both favor "know what you plan to talk about first, then learn it" - Create a Groove 2007 workspace to help the 3 of us collaborate on this
Although we are in the same group, we work with different audiences - hence weeks can go by without bumping into each other. - Start collating supporting documents, articles, blogs using Onfolio, stored in Groove.
- Download and setup a machine to run the SAAS Sample application LitwareHR.
- Revisit the Description of the Workshop
- Panic some more :-)
- Learn more about SAAS...
The description is interesting as oddly enough, although I wrote it, I don't necessarily agree with it, but I do like it...)
"The Software as a Service on-demand model is the fastest growing market segment in the industry. End users are demanding it and there are already many high profile examples of software vendors who are successfully providing it. But how do software companies overcome the many model, code, and operational issues to successfully bring a SaaS solution to market? How do customers ensure that solutions delivered via SaaS work great with their existing on-premise applications?
Microsoft is currently working to offer software vendors detailed technical assistance to help them address these issues - with a focus on building a scalable, secure, and highly available SaaS solution. At the same time Microsoft is also learning how to be a successful vendor of SaaS solutions and hence has some but not all of the answers.
The workshop will attempt to share our current thinking on SaaS and the advice and guidance we are sharing with ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) who wish to adopt a SaaS model. However we recognise that this is a complex area and we therefore wish to use the workshop to pool peoples thinking on the challenges and opportunities of SaaS – hopefully bringing together Architects from customers and ISVs in the same room. This is a great opportunity to validate and influence Microsoft’s thinking in this area and in turn the capabilities we will see ISVs building into their offerings over the next few years.
The session will cover some of the none-technical aspects of SaaS but the focus will be on architecture. It will be relevant to architects within ISVs and customers. It will assume no prior knowledge of SaaS."