As the hosting business is a low margin business support cost is a very critical area that they want to have as low as possible. In many low-end offerings you actually don’t have any support other than calling high priced hotlines. If you do get support...

If you go to www.microsoft.com/saas you will end up with the definition: “Software deployed as a Service and accessed using Internet technologies”. To me this is very broad probably too broad. Unfortunately I don’t have anything clearer and more precise...

Many hosters make their money servicing consumers in a low margin business. Many of them have a business brand like Cohaesio vs. Surftown or Schlund&Partner vs. 1&1. I’m not sure how realistic a scenario would be where a hoster would give up...

In a hosted environment an application will not have the full freedom of choosing it’s runtime behavior and the way it is being provisioned. There are many policies defined in a hosted environment that need to be enforced from the service provider. Therefore...

Michel Baladi posted a lot of information on the outcome of our efforts regarding the SaaS Delivery platform in his blog. You can find the information at blogs.msdn.com/baladi

The two most significant innovations which came out of the Architecture sessions are those two manifests. The application manifest is something built by the software vendor to actually define the needs of an application in a hosted environment. It contains...

We discussed the shared database approach or multi-tenant data layer and came to the conclusion that running backups is not so much of a problem but restoring data on a tenant by tenant basis would be a complex pattern that is not supported currently...

with the nex posts I'd like to share some of my experiences with Software as a Service. They are intended to be a basis for a discussion and my very personal view.

I'm actually using them myself and find them one of the most useful resources that I'm aware of. Check them out at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx .