http://ayende.comAyende @ RahienCopyright (C) Ayende Rahien 2004 - 2021 (c) 202660Good post. Similar problems exist for contact management which I guess is really the same problem expressed in a different domain. Interestingly most of the negative comments seem to be saying either "this is too hard for me" or "I can't be bothered"!http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment9http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment9Fri, 02 Sep 2011 11:41:00 GMTDaniel, You are missing the chance of losing users who are highly valuable. When you are doing this up front (thinking about it), this is much easier than trying to retro fit things. And users with multiple accounts tend to be the ones that you want to keep, they will bring you additional accountshttp://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment8http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment8Fri, 02 Sep 2011 06:07:14 GMTUsers are trained to behave this way most of the time i.e. working around the technicalities. How do you fix a problem that for most users have become a natural habit stemming from previous SaaS failures that don't capture reality into their systems?http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment7http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment7Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:46:32 GMTMy general experience with SaaS developers is, that time is VERY rare. If you want to ship to the market, you'll have to concentrate on the interesting bits that create value for MOST of your customers. Since most people won't ever consider running two accounts with one user, you should ask yourself: "Is it really worth creating a more sophisticated, but complex user-account system?" Ayende, it normally takes 10 or more experienced developers to build something like RavenDB within 3 years. I'm sorry, but you are not qualified to answer this question in a way that could be useful for normal developers. :-)http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment6http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment6Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:05:08 GMTThere is another overlapping scenario. A large organization may have multiple corporate accounts into the same Saas system. It might be desired to have some users to have access to only their home account. Then it might be desired to have some other users to have access to their home accounts (as default), and other accounts. Then you might have the requirement that if your home account is X, you have full access, but you may or may not have read only access to other accounts. http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment5http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment5Thu, 01 Sep 2011 17:59:45 GMT@Wayne, Here's what you call a fringe case, but is daily reality for me. We have an enterprise with several legal entities. One of those legal entities operates as a department in our offices, but has its own products, marketing strategy, targets, etc. This department for all intents and purposes operates entirely separately from the rest of the business, but certain services are shared, such as IT, Finance and HR. In IT, I need to be able to log onto both "orgs" (Salesforce speak), and I would preferably want to do this with one account. Inability to do so will effectively prohibit such things as AD integration and single sign-on. http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment4http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment4Thu, 01 Sep 2011 13:25:32 GMTWayne, That only holds water until you have the Efficiency Consultant came to a business and NOT recommend your product because he doesn't want to remember another password. http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment3http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment3Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:26:13 GMTVery insightful post, Ayende. You bring up an interesting point, but I would have to say that for *most* SaaS offerings there's no issue of a user having multiple accounts they're managing, since most commercial SaaS products seem to be targeted at solutions for a single company with a subset of users; having the notion that one user can belong to multiple companies is appropriate for certain scenarios,and not for others. For instance, I'm going to be creating a SaaS product designed to be a very light CRM and appointment system for businesses like lawn care, carpet cleaning, plumbers and the like. In this case, the second model is sufficient in essentially all business cases as chances are slim to none that John Smith of Acme Lawn Care is going to also be doing work for Great Lawns Inc and will need to see both accounts. I could see the need in some fringe cases where somebody views themselves as a "serial entrepreneur" and has several different businesses, but those are the exception and not the rule.http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment2http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment2Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:22:00 GMTAyende, I have to say you bring up an interesting topic that I really have not give any thought to. I have never used AWS but am surprised that they would go with a User is the Account model. It just seems so obviously wrong. To date all SaaS applications that I have designed or worked on have used the second model you describe; the Account owns the users. For the most part this has always worked well except for case were we had a head office wanting move all their franchisees to our system and have one employee of the head office have access to all franchisee accounts. Having gone with your second model that required the employee to have different credentials for each franchisee account. Certainly not ideal. Although allowing users to belong to multiple accounts adds complexity to user management and billing it is alot easier to tackle in the early stages rather than 2 years after launching and having lots of customers on the system. Great post!http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment1http://ayende.com/78849/a-user-an-account-and-saas#comment1Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:38:21 GMT