Providing Software as a Service

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For those of you who decide to build services that extend the power of desktop applications, enhance web experiences, or all of the above this is the place to go for reference architecture on building those services.  There is some fantastic guidance on security and how a multi-tenant data model should work.  Probably the most exciting part is the LitwareHR application, which is an actual working implementation of the SaaS pattern.

One of the reasons I highlight this, is Ray Ozzie's (our Chief Software Architect) comments from a recent Goldman Sach's conference.  We are spending extraordinary amounts of time building out architecture for extremely large scale Service Architectures, and we want you to take advantage of that architecture.  While this is merely a first step into that world, more will be coming in the future.  One of the more interesting excerpts from Ray's comments:

Connected entertainment, connected productivity, connected business -- the opportunity really is only fulfilled if we have a services platform upon which to build these services at dramatic scale. One of the first things that I tackled when coming into Microsoft was to work with different groups to understand that each one of them was going to somehow reshape their services over time, or their product over time, based on services, and that internally, we needed a very robust, very high-scale services platform so that every group didn't have to build a service from scratch top to bottom. So we've been building the services platform that will be used within the company. Ultimately the economies of scale that we gain internally are going to be available to third-party developers and enterprises who don't deploy things at anywhere near that scale. So kind of at a high level, what I've been working on is driving a services mission throughout the company in the different areas, the three different primary business groups.

 Anyway, enjoy and let us know what you think!

 

https://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/112108.asp