SaaS Connection Manager

 October 2012 Newsletter Excerpt

This web-based application allows our SaaS customers to request new users, see their disk usage broken down by category, and handle their user connections themselves.

One of the advantages of Software as a Service (SaaS) is eliminating the managing of Odyssey upgrades (both hardware and software). This means your company does not need to be concerned about server hardware, server backups, or server disaster recovery. Odyssey upgrades and maintenance releases are handled for you so you do not need IT staffing in-house to perform these upgrades.

One of the disadvantages is access to the server's local resources. For most this is not an issue. Why should you be concerned or want access to the local hard drives, memory chips, or anything else related to the physical machine? Quite honestly, you shouldn't.

The only reason I am bringing this up is because most of our SaaS (B&L Cloud) customers start out with an allotted disk space of 50GB. This 50GB of disk space is for the Odyssey database, links, custom reports, and other user files. Without access to the local server how are they supposed to know when they are approaching their disk capacity? Also, what about the user's connection to our server? What if they get hung up for some reason? Sure you can contact support and we can reset their session, but wouldn't it be nice if you could see disk usage and handle user connections yourself?

Let me introduce you to the new B&L SaaS Connection Manager.This web-based application allows our SaaS customers to request new users, see their disk usage broken down by category, and handle their user connections themselves.They are able to see what users are active, disconnected, how long they have been idle, what time they logged onto the system, and other pertinent client information.They can log off a user remotely (without access to the server) and request that a user be removed from the server (see screenshot).

 

As you can see, we have put a tool into the hands of our SaaS customers in order to resolve the disadvantage of not having direct access to the server. Also, keep in mind that this tool will evolve as the new user interface becomes available. You will no longer need access to user connections for you will be using a zero client interface instead of the remote desktop interface we use today.

 (From the desk of Joe Harmon, Vice President - Technology)