The Freak Parade

 Our team has recently embarked on the construction of a new application that is to be delivered using the SaaS model (hey, it’s what all the cool kids are doing.) As with nearly any modern software application, especially one delivered from the omnipotent Cloud, this new application must be able to integrate with systems and participate in process automations that are outside of its firewall. Additionally, because the model is SaaS, the application must be multi-tenant.

Strictly speaking, what we’re building is an almost feature for feature re-write of an existing application. However, the original app was written half a dozen years or so ago and even that effort was mostly just a port to ASP.NET from an even older classic ASP web site. My oh my how the computing environment has changed since then. Looking back it feels to me like the difference between putting together a model airplane and building an F-16.

Any line of business application being grown in the modern world that is expected to participate in modern process automations ends up being more like a bush or a tree than an n-layer cake. You can’t just bake the thing, slop on a little icing and throw it on the dinner table. It has to be grown in layers from a carefully considered seed and surgically grafted onto the living, thriving root system of an existing technological and human powered ecosystem.

I was rather taken aback, when I started to lay all this out in my mind, how many facets there are to building a “simple” business app in today’s day and age. To try and get some grasp on the big picture (which, thankfully, isn’t the most complicated big picture out there) I ended up mind mapping my understanding of your basic multi-tenant line of business app. It is a very rough sketch, and I intend to refine it as time goes on. Some of the nodes on the map have links to previous blog posts of mine or external resources, and I intend to add blog posts for many more of the items in this diagram as I get to those aspects of our own software. The next item on the agenda is Identity Management. If you have any suggestions, corrections or comments, I’d love to hear them. You can go to a full screen version of the mind map by clicking this link.

BTW – this was done using a combination of Mindjet Mind Manager and MindMeister.