Re: [provision] "Modify" Provisioning Scenarios for Multi-Tenant ASPs

[Gavenraj Sodhi <gsodhi1@cox.net>]

Title: "Modify" Provisioning Scenarios for Multi-Tenant ASPs

Anand,

I think these are good points you have brought up and could be applied and
re-used as adds, moves, changes, etc... for provisioning in ASPs, enterprise
apps, meta-directories...  I will add some additional use cases based on
your points and pass it back to the group. 

-Gavenraj


Ranthidevan, Anand wrote:

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Here are a few "modify" scenarios that we have seen over the past couple of years in everyday Provisioning in the world of Multi-Tenant ASPs.  A multi-tenant ASP hosts multiple customers (and their users) on the same instance of their software.  Examples of such ASPs include WebEx, UpShot, EmployEase, Salesforce.com

We could decide whether or not these are Provisioning related items -- but, for all the above ASPs you do these modifications using their Provisioning APIs.

These are *not* considered EAI problems since they are not "business data" (financials, inventory, sales, etc).  Also, these are usually not considered "Data Synchronization" problems as they are more of a 'modify' profile/provisioning related issues. The data below belongs to one of the following:

-- Company Profile (Name, Address, Phone, etc)
-- User Profile (Name, Title, Dept, Address, Phone, etc)
-- Service Profile (various configurable attributes of a service)

=========================================================================

All the multi-tenant ASPs require the following info for a user to login:
-- CompanyID  (eg. CompanyName.  ASP has to make sure this is unique among its Companies.  There is a problem if multiple companies have the same name (eg.  Fidelity Investments and Fidelity Music and Fidelity Motors could all be customers of the ASP.)

-- UserID (eg. FirstInitialLastName.  Company has to make sure this is unique within its organization.)
-- UserPassword

Scenario 1:  Modify Company Name
Description: 
Assume that Andersen Consulting has changed its name to Accenture.  And, they want employees to login to the ASP using an updated CompanyID of Accenture.

Scenario 2:  Modify Company Location
Description:
Assume that Accenture has moved its headquarters from NYC to LA.  Update the Address at the ASP.

Scenario 3:  Modify User Name
Description:
Accenture employee Mary Smith just got married.  Her new name is Mary Jones. Accenture has changed her UserID internally to mjones.  The ASP must also update her UserID to mjones.  Note:  Some ASPs do not allow this.  They require a "de-provision" and then "provision" of the user.  This results in data loss and is generally unacceptable to the user)

Scenario 4:  Modify User Title
Description:
May Jones has been promoted to VP.  This change is title needs to be reflected in the user profile in the ASP.

Scenario 4:  Modify User Service (Upgrade)
Description:
Now that Mary Jones has become a VP, she has to be upgraded to the "gold" service at the ASP.

=========================================================================

Should we call out more specific Use Cases for these? Will these be covered?

Thanks,
-Anand