Take Your Older Software Code And Add Multi-tenant Capabilities

By Author: Sukumar Jena
Total Articles: 2
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Overview
A multi-tenant software is capable of serving multiple needs in multiple organizations or markets. Here are the architectural considerations while building a multi-tenant software,
• Scalability - to handle large volumes of users and data
• Configurability - so features can be turned on and off
• Support for multiple languages and currencies
• A Compelling User Experience (UX) to drive usage and revenue

All of these architectural elements must be designed into the base product and not added on later so that the software can continue to expand without requiring a rewrite. On top of these requirements, there is a more recent, product architectural consideration that IT shops are starting to wrestle with now, and this is multi-tenancy. Let’s look more at this particular architectural requirement to understand it better.

Many outsourced product development firms have been serving software companies for years to build healthy, multi-tenant software products, such as SalesForce. That allow each customer to feel they are using their own version of software and data. This ...
... kind of software can allow IT shops borrow from the software product industry to help them build and maintain software in a more strategic way for their business.

A good outsourced product development firm can even take older software code base and add mutli-tenant capabilities software. Here are the seven key elements in transforming a software single tenant application / software into a multi-tenant software,
(1) Tenant level data isolation
(2) Tenant level data model extensibility/customization
(3) Tenant level customization of UI themes/look and feel, forms and data capture widgets, notification templates and delivery mechanisms
(4) Tenant level creation and administration of roles and privileges, field level access permissions, data access policies
(5) Tenant level access control settings for modules and features, so that specific modules and features could be enabled /disabled for different tenants
(6) Tenant level business rule and workflow customization
(7) Tenant aware reporting tools
Migrating a single tenant data model to one that supports multiple tenants involves implementing a data architecture that provides the optimal degree of isolation/security of data at the tenant level, typically one of the following three… Read more on multi-tenant capabilities