SaaS Template Evolution Model Based on Tenancy History

SaaS (Software as a Service) applications need to be customizable to fulfill the various specific business needs of individual tenants. A tenant may customize with the same application more than once, which commonly occur with changed functional and quality requirements as time goes. Preservation of history tenancy metadata can contribute to the tenant mistakes recovery or as a starting point for next customization. If SaaS applications maintain only the latest customization content for each tenant, it will be very inconvenience. In particular, tenancy history metadata can be used to adjust templates. Therefore, we propose importance of preservation for tenancy history metadata. In order to improve the convenience of on-demand customization and user experience, shorten the tenants' customization time, improved QoS, we also propose a method for adjusting template objects dynamically based on XML structured features for tenancy metadata. This method can adjust according to the update of tenancy history metadata, when the requirements of tenants change, the template update accordingly by analyzing tenancy history metadata from Graphic User Interface (GUI), workflow, service, and data layer. The updated templates will support customization in a cost effective way, in addition, can be provided to the Independent Software Developers (ISV) as a reference in next application upgrade. Finally, experiments show that template adjustment algorithm in the application is feasible and efficient.