For cost reasons, our solution will require a “shared” platform in Azure with the UI being a mixture of Asp.Net MVC and also a couple of “apps”. My question is … does the office store offer the ability to do monthly billing and is there a service out there that allows us to on-board and manage Tenants?
Update …
If you want to do billing and to use the Office store licensing capabilities then this article will help and this article announces the launch of the store.
I also asked this on the 365 IT PRo Network Yammer group and got a great reply from Jeremy Thake. I am sure he won’t mind me pasting his response here so it’s “Googleable” …
“Right now you will need create your tenant and web sites (Provider Hosted part) manually in the Azure Management Portal or through Visual Studio. The intention is that you host this web site instance as a multi-tenant instance for your customers. The licensing of this instance would be through your Azure billing and you, as the ISV, would need to pay for this.
You can then sell the app through the Office Store and let that handle licensing (or handle the license through your own mechanisms – Nintex and AvePoint both do this).
If you want to do dedicated instances of the provider hosted, then you would need to provide instructions to the customer on how to create the Azure Web Site in their own instance and provide them the deployment package. They would then be the ones who get the bills through the Azure tenant.
Also, you are not going to be able to use the store as the App package will need to point to different web site URLs. In this instance you’ll have to manage licensing yourself and provide them the app package to upload into the App Catalog.
There are pros and cons to both approaches. Naturally there is no risk of your multi-tenant provider hosted web site bill going nuts as your service grows because the customer is paying the cost. But then you have to handle all the licensing yourself and can’t use the store as a marketplace (unless you do multi-tenant for some sort of trial to just test the app).
If you go with the multi-tenant approach, you’ll need to include in the cost of your Office Store app for the costs of running your Azure instance. As someone who’s just come from a vendor, this is not always easy to calculate until you’ve had the service running for a while and can predictably see growth and costs.
I hope this helps.”
