Thursday, June 03, 2010

APEX app as SaaS

As I blogged yesterday, I was working on making DG Tournament SaaS.
That is completed now :-)

Let's say ODTUG would like to offer all the conference people the ability to follow the World Cup 2010 in a fun way. So they see the scores, they can bet on the games and communicate with each other.


So what are the options for me to provide them with such a service:

  • I could create a packaged application from an adapted version of DG Tournament and send to them so they put it on their server.
  • I could copy the database schema and APEX app into a new schema and workspace and host it for them.
  • I could keep using only one version of DG Tournament, but let it behave differently depending a parameter (url, key, ...).
They have all advantages and disadvantages, but my preference would be the last option. It would basically mean I provide DG Tournament as a Service (SaaS = Software as a Service).

The biggest advantages I see in this case are:
  • only one version of the app to maintain (bug fixing, performance optimizations etc)
  • only one time I need to fill in the scores
  • minimal time to provide this service to another company (no copy of tables, apps etc. just a new record in the database)
So I changed DG Tournament that if somebody would be interested in this service, they could:
  • have custom look (banner on top)
  • if they click on the banner they go to your homepage
  • if you login as an admin you can adapt the text of the homepage, so you could for ex. talk about the price for the winner
  • the rankings and shoutbox are for your users alone, so nobody else will see what your people say and you have your own ranking
I put the example online here so you can see it in action!

8 comments:

Steve-o said...

Hi Dimitri,
What's happened to http://www.dgtournament.com/
???
I've been telling all my collegues here about your fantastic site and that we should register... and the site is now down.
Is it coming back? Can we get on it?
Thanks.
Steve.

Olivier Dupont said...

Hey Dimitri,

Will there be an option to use this Saas model for the world cup 2010?

Dimitri Gielis said...

Steve-o,

DG Tournament is up for me?
Can you try again maybe.
If you still have problems report it please as it should be up 24/24 ;-)

Thanks,
Dimitri

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hi Olivier,

Yes I enabled it for the World Cup 2010. If you want to use it for your company drop me a mail please.

Dimitri

Unknown said...

Great Idea & solution!
A little bit more than the "new group item" I asked for, always nice to get more then you asked for ;-)
Hopefully the possibility to compare my own bets with the rest of "the world" will remain.
Being a champ at home is nice being a world champ even nicer ;-)
/Gunnar

Steve-o said...

Hey Dimitri,
I can access it through chrome and firefox, but not IE... the same for several collegues, so putting it down to out work network!
I've input my predictions (most of which will be completely wrong!) and I'm sure a few more will appear shortly, all with Location of RICOH.
I really like what you've done with apex, I'm just getting in to it myself!
Thanks for letting us use it!
Steve-o

Dimitri Gielis said...

Hi Steve-o,

Not sure what happened there... I could reproduce it not working on IE a few times, but now everything seems to work again.
Can you try again and let me know if it's fixed for you.

Thanks,
Dimitri

Steve-o said...

Seems to be ok on IE now Dimitri,
thanks.
Steve-o