Force Platform

It sure feels like a long time ago since I first started working on this project. I'm very happy to announce that the sample SaaS application has finally arrived!

Litware HR is a sample SaaS application that is implemented with current generation of application platform technology: .NET framework 3.0, SQL server 2005, Windows server 2003 and ADAM.

Definitely more important than the actual (limited) recruiting features of the application, is our vision for Litware HR to be a practical learning tool for ISV to learn about the techniques for taming the three headed monster of multi-tenancy.

Multi-tenancy covers a lot of grounds and it is impossible for us to cover all the topics in this release. For this release, I would say that the technical focus is definitely on the configurability aspect of the application. We have done quite a bit with meta data to show how UI, workflow and data models can be configured for each tenant. Around security, we have implemented a security token service for authentication, and demonstrated the use of the tenant filter view pattern explained in our multi-tenant data architecture paper.

My hope is that this release marks the birth of a SaaS architecture learning tool that with the help of the community, will grow to incorporate other SaaS architectural gems.

As I mentioned in my first SaaS blog post: "SaaS is a journey, walk with us". For this instance, let's take a walk through Litware HR...

Here are the pointers to the relevant resources:

Code and related documentation (including webcasts):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/saas/sampleApp

Community site with forums for discussions, reporting bugs, suggestiing and voting on new features and most definitely, contributing code:

http://www.codeplex.com/litwareHR

For those who just want to sit back, take it easy and watch some movies on what this is all about, here are the video links:

Demo Walkthrough: http://files.skyscrapr.net/users/saas/sampleApp/Videos/LitwareDemo.wmv

Architecture Webcast: http://files.skyscrapr.net/users/saas/sampleApp/Videos/LitwareArchitecture.wmv (this video is meant to be seen after the demo walkthrough)