This release of SaaSGrid introduces the following major features:

  • Tenant-wide pricing introduction
  • Checkout process changes
  • Subscription information display improvements
  • Remote API

Please continue reading to learn more about these features. Additionally, several minor enhancements to existing functionality and bug fixes have been completed and rolled out with this release.

Tenant-wide Pricing Introduction

The largest and most sweeping change in SaaSGrid for this release is the introduction of Tenant-wide Pricing.

There are now three clear pricing methodologies when monetizing applications that you produce with SaaSGrid:

  • User-based subscription pricing: originally available since the first release, this pricing structure is defined and applied to every user that is assigned a subscription. Access and usage of features is monitored for the user that the subscription is assigned to.
  • Tenant-wide pricing: newly introduced, it is now possible to require a tenant to purchase a subscription to your application. It is defined just like the user-based subscription, but access and usage of features is controlled for all users as opposed to a specific user. Note that any metered feature usage is shared among all of a tenant's users. This pricing is optional and need not be defined unless needed.
  • Concurrent user subscription pricing: introduced recently but now separated into a distinct pricing option, this pricing is applied to charge for the public facing interface portion of a SaaSGrid application. This pricing is optional and applies only to those applications containing a public interface, which you can learn more about here.

To support these new pricing options, changes were made on both the tenant and provider portals. The Provider Portal Pricebook section has been changed extensively to provide a clearer separation of concerns for pricebook-related functionality. Major re-work of the Subscriptions and Usage section of the tenant portal was conducted to support the new pricing options, described in more detail in a later section. Here is a screenshot of the pricebook as it appears in the Provider Portal:

Checkout Process Changes

The checkout process has also been changed extensively as summarized below:

  • It now supports and clarifies the three different pricing options specified above as a part of the introduction of tenant-wide features. Note that the very first time a tenant purchases a subscription, if a tenant-wide pricing definition has been specified they must purchase a tenant-wide subscription. Once doing this, they'll be able to purchase user-based subscriptions and concurrent user subscriptions.
  • It is possible to define a new payment method when purchasing the application, and filtering of the payment method is conducted to honor the billing preferences configured in the deployment settings of the application (see screenshot below).

Subscription Information Display Improvements

The tenant portal has always displayed basic information about a subscriptions purchased for the application. Major enhancements have been made to this area of the application:

  • Viewing and editing the tenant-wide subscription has been introduced and is shown in the tenant portal for applicable products.
  • Better navigation and separation of concerns for actions taken regarding a specific subscription have been implemented. It should now be more straight-forward for tenants to monitor the feature usage of a subscription, view invoices related to the subscription, and take actions against the subscription such as re-assignment, modification, or cancellation.
  • An improved user assignment screen makes it possible to assign multiple users to multiple subscriptions at the same time.

 

Remote API

We introduced the Remote API to permit connections to SaaSGrid applications from outside the SaaSGrid echo system. By using this API, you can use all of the API metadata remotely and communicate with web services for your particular application using external clients. This provides improved support for writing supplemental tools such as Mobile clients or desktop widgets that can communicate with applications deployed in SaaSGrid. In an upcoming release of SaaSGrid you will also be able to use the Remote API to communicate to SaaSGrid applications using SOAP 1.1 and the BasicHttpBinding.

A new version of the SaaSGrid SDK has been released containing the API, and our published documentation for the API has been updated.