Overall Planning
Plan the system carefully before the software installation.
It is important to identify certain key requirements early, because they may have profound implications on the way the hardware or software is to be set up. Importance of planning is greatly increased for the Software as a Service (SaaS) setups where a Application Service Provider (ASP) offers the services to several customers.
In this document, a customer means an independent subsystem within the server system. A server system may be hosting several customers simultaneously while each customer has:
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Separate services of possibly different, even customized, versions
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Separate service access points in terms of end user terminals
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Separate data
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Separate business logic
Also, each customer:
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May share physical resources with other customers (servers, gateways…)
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Is not necessarily one-to-one to customer companies of a service center, but for example a subsystem of one.
For example, a technical customer may be a commercial customer of an ASP that hosts Sinch Contact Pro services. Another technical customer may, in turn, be an internal subdivision of such a commercial customer. All systems are set up using the same procedures regardless of whether it will host one or more subsystems or whether the system has one or more servers available.