Application Hosting

[Terry Holland]

This may not be the most appropriate group for this question so if there is
a more relevant one then feel free to directo me to it.


We have written an application for our organisation. The application has
the following components

ASP.Net 2.0 Application
SQL Server 2005 DB
Winforms scanning application (installed on clinet machines)
Windows services to control printing jobs (installed on server)
Scheduled tasks (installed on server)

Other organisations are now interested in our application and one of the
options I need to explore is whether it is feasible for the app to be sold
as a hosted solution.
This is something that I have not done before so I am in the process of
gathering as much info as possible on the issues that may affect whether we
go down this path.

The questions that immediately come to mind are...

1) When setting up an hosted solution, would it be the case that the servers
we hire would be on a diff domain or is it possiblle to get servers on
domain of our choice?

2) at present our application uses windows authentication. AD groups are
used to access fileservers. We use SQL Roles to secure various db objects
and we use ASPNet Roles to control access to various web pages. Im assuming
that using a hosted solution, we would not have access to AD group
membership?

3) Our winforms app is used to scan documents and attach to client records.
This app controls a scanner that is installed on client pc. When the docs
are scanned, we currently move to our file server using a simple file.move
command. Im ussuming that we would need to modify this to use ftp (secure)

4) If the hosted app (Windows services to control printing jobs) is on diff
domain, how do we manage to print to printers on company domain?

Im sure there are other issues that I have not mentioned. Please feel free
to mention anything you feel relevant

tia

Terry Holland

 

[Alexey Smirnov]

1) When setting up an hosted solution, would it be the case that the servers
we hire would be on a diff domain or is it possiblle to get servers on
domain of our choice?

Usually most providers offer such service to get domains of our
choice. It's also recommended to keep domain and hosting separate
because of safety reasons (e.g. when you host is dead you can forward
your customers to a new host). If you choose to keep domain and
hosting separate, you would need to register new domain name, choose a
web host, and point the domain at the registrar to your web host.
Otherwise, all this can be done (in most cases) at your web host.

2) at present our application uses windows authentication.  AD groups are
used to access fileservers.  We use SQL Roles to secure various db objects
and we use ASPNet Roles to control access to various web pages.  Im assuming
that using a hosted solution, we would not have access to AD group
membership?

If this new site is a stand alone application then it makes no sense
to think about AD for external users. Just use a role-based
security...

3) Our winforms app is used to scan documents and attach to client records.
This app controls a scanner that is installed on client pc.  When the docs
are scanned, we currently move to our file server using a simple file.move
command.  Im ussuming that we would need to modify this to use ftp (secure)
yes

4) If the hosted app (Windows services to control printing jobs) is on diff
domain, how do we manage to print to printers on company domain?

As far as I understood, the service is used to print files on
schedule. That means that it should be able to get the files. Domain
in not really an issue here, because you can set up as many domains as
you want pointing to the same server. The issue is that you should be
able to access files from that FTP server you mentioned above. So, if
FTP will be located outside of your corporate network you probably
should do another service which would copy files from remote FTP to
your print server. And only after that you will be able to print these
files.