Prior to our public launch of www.knowledgeplaza.net, we had been working with the enterprise edition of KP. We have one on-premise client using KPE (client in-house infrastructure), rest of cases are SaaS (software accessed remotely). But moving from a on-demand model to an automatic online sign-up open for everyone requires an intensive workload from the development point of view. I have briefly collected some insightful opinions from some of our developers so that they share with us their experiences on this massive swift of going fully ‘cloud’.

According to Raphael Slinckx, lead developer at Whatever, « the main challenge was moving from a manually operated instance creation and administration to a fully automated process that allows people to write their name in a box and have a running instance few seconds later ». This implies deploying a virtual machine creation, instance admin panel, and automated tasks. All instances created with Knowledge Plaza reside in a centralized repository and are handled similarly which allows for a much more streamlined administration. The integration of a billing-payment gateway is also a crucial aspect here. And we don’t mean just the paying process. Now, users can get more or less service provision with a click of a mouse and that needs to be implemented in the architecture in a robust manner.

We also want to emphasize the importance of having a private beta period, not only to fine tune the service fixing bugs but also to test the server load. We monitored the server load to see if it grew according to our model (and adapted the model as needed).

SaaS might be still in its infancy (we’ll leave that discussion for now), but net users aren’t. As technology evolves fast, we are tuning into advanced users with a -logically- lower tolerance to slowness or irresponsiveness. Server load testing processes are necessary to get ready for ‘massive consumption and usage’, to provide a good responsive service to that end user.

Likewise, as Patrick Rácz -developer with UI focus- points out, « adoption is more volatile in the cloud« , meaning end-users are also getting used to user-friendliness on cloud services. Thus, enterprise 2.0 apps in the cloud have some quite challenge here in terms of usability.

One of the main concerns of companies considering a move onto SaaS enterprise 2.0 is data migration. Currently, there are no standards for that (just like there is not yet cloud interoperability or ‘cross-cloud compatibility’), meaning that if you have your data on a system and you’d like to start using a different one, exporting those data won’t be an easy task, at all. Sticky services. Given that the underlying concepts of apps in the cloud may differ from each other, you can’t have a « standard » to represent them without information loss. Any migration would have to be done the way we handled migration from data into KP for other customers: 1) extract the old data in « some » readable format, 2) make a manual analysis on the best way to map the old data model to the new data model and 3) create a custom written conversion script.

So, due to that lack of standards, we offer assistance service with data migration. Upon request, as we’ve done with companies using Knowledge Plaza Enterprise, we can either import or export a database dump of all the data. So far, it’s a manual process trying to ensure and validate data integrity.

Finally, whether challenging or not, they seem to agree that this process of moving onto an automated online sign-up has been time-consuming. Indeed. We have now new milestones ahead.

Click here for Support

Title: characters. Most search engines use a maximum of 60 chars for the title. Description: Challenges of going cloud and enterprise 2.0 SaaS from the technical perspective. Knowledge Plaza developers share their experiences with us.