Toward Customizable Multi-tenant SaaS Applications

abstract: Nowadays, Computing is so pervasive that it has become indeed the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, telephony) as Leonard Kleinrock once envisioned. Evolved from utility computing, cloud computing has emerged as a computing infrastructure that enables rapid delivery of computing resources as a utility in a dynamically scalable, virtualized manner. However, the current industrial cloud computing implementations promote segregation among different cloud providers, which leads to user lockdown because of prohibitive migration cost. On the other hand, Service-Orented Computing (SOC) including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web Services (WS) promote standardization and openness with its enabling standards and communication protocols. This thesis proposes a Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Architecture by combining the best attributes of the two paradigms to promote an open, interoperable environment for cloud computing development. Mutil-tenancy SaaS applicantions built on top of SOCCA have more flexibility and are not locked down by a certain platform. Tenants residing on a multi-tenant application appear to be the sole owner of the application and not aware of the existence of others. A multi-tenant SaaS application accommodates each tenant’s unique requirements by allowing tenant-level customization. A complex SaaS application that supports hundreds, even thousands of tenants could have hundreds of customization points with each of them providing multiple options, and this could result in a huge number of ways to customize the application. This dissertation also proposes innovative customization approaches, which studies similar tenants’ customization choices and each individual users behaviors, then provides guided semi-automated customization process for the future tenants. A semi-automated customization process could enable tenants to quickly implement the customization that best suits their business needs.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences

Adaptive hypertext and hypermedia : workshop : proceedings, 3rd, Sonthofen, Germany, July 14, 2001 and Aarhus, Denmark, August 15, 2001

This paper presents two empirical usability studies based on techniques from Human-Computer Interaction (HeI) and software engineering, which were used to elicit requirements for the design of a hypertext generation system. Here we will discuss the findings of these studies, which were used to motivate the choice of adaptivity techniques. The results showed dependencies between different ways to adapt the explanation content and the document length and formatting. Therefore, the system's architecture had to be modified to cope with this requirement. In addition, the system had to be made adaptable, in addition to being adaptive, in order to satisfy the elicited users' preferences