APEX app as SaaS

As I blogged yesterday, I was working on making DG Tournament (site no longer online) SaaS.
That is completed now :-)

Let’s say ODTUG would like to offer all the conference people the ability to follow the World Cup 2010 in a fun way. So they see the scores, they can bet on the games and communicate with each other.

So what are the options for me to provide them with such a service:

• I could create a packaged application from an adapted version of DG Tournament and send to them so they put it on their server.
• I could copy the database schema and APEX app into a new schema and workspace and host it for them.
• I could keep using only one version of DG Tournament, but let it behave differently depending a parameter (url, key, …).

They have all advantages and disadvantages, but my preference would be the last option. It would basically mean I provide DG Tournament as a Service (SaaS = Software as a Service).

The biggest advantages I see in this case are:

• only one version of the app to maintain (bug fixing, performance optimizations etc)

• only one time I need to fill in the scores

• minimal time to provide this service to another company (no copy of tables, apps etc. just a new record in the database)

So I changed DG Tournament that if somebody would be interested in this service, they could:

• have custom look (banner on top)
• if they click on the banner they go to your homepage
• if you login as an admin you can adapt the text of the homepage, so you could for ex. talk about the price for the winner
• the rankings and shoutbox are for your users alone, so nobody else will see what your people say and you have your own ranking

I put the example online here (site no longer online) so you can see it in action!