Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
151 lines (100 loc) · 10.3 KB

marketplace-saas-applications-technical-publishing-guide.md

File metadata and controls

151 lines (100 loc) · 10.3 KB
title description services documentationcenter author manager editor ms.assetid ms.service ms.workload ms.tgt_pltfrm ms.devlang ms.topic ms.date ms.author
Azure Marketplace SaaS Applications Technical Publishing Guide
Step-by-step guide and publishing checklists for publishing SaaS applications to Azure Marketplace
Marketplace, Compute, Storage, Networking, Blockchain, Security, SaaS
keithcharlie
nunoc
keithcharlie
marketplace
article
07/09/2018
keithcharlie

SaaS applications Offer Publishing Guide

SaaS applications can be published in the marketplace with three different calls to action: "Contact Me," "Try it now," and "Get it Now." This guide explains these three options, including requirements for each.

Offer overview

SaaS applications are available in both Azure Storefronts The following table describes the current available options:

Storefront option Listing Trial/Transact
AppSource Yes (Contact Me) Yes (PowerBI/Dynamics)
Azure marketplace No Yes (SaaS Apps)

List: The Listing publishing option consists of a Contact Me offer type and is used when a Trial- or Transaction-level participation is not feasible. The benefit of this approach is that it enables publishers with a solution in-market to immediately begin receiving leads that can be turned into deals to increase your business.
Trial/Transaction: The customer has the option to directly buy or request a trial for your solution. Providing a Trial experience increases the engagement level offered to customers and enables customers to explore your solution before buying. With a Trial experience, you will have better chances of promotion in the storefronts, and you should expect more and richer leads from customer engagements. Trials must include free support at least for the duration of the trial period.

SaaS Apps Offer Business Requirements Technical Requirements
Contact Us Yes No
PowerBI / Dynamics Yes Yes (Azure AD integration)
SaaS Apps Yes Yes (Azure AD integration)

SaaS List

The call to action for a SaaS listing with no trial and no billing functionality is "Contact Me."

You do not need to configure Azure Active Directory to list a SaaS application.

Requirements Details
Your app is a SaaS offering Your solution is a SaaS offering and you offer a multitenant SaaS product.

SaaS Trial

You provide a solution or app using a free-to-try, software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based trial. Free trial offers may be presented as a limited-use or limited-duration trial account.

Requirements Details
Your app is a SaaS offering Your solution is a SaaS offering and you offer a multitenant SaaS product.
Your app is AAD enabled The customer will be re-directed to your domain and you will transact with the customer directly

SaaS Trial Technical requirements

The technical requirements for SaaS applications are simple. Publishers are only required to be integrated with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to be published. Azure AD integration with applications is well documented and Microsoft provides multiple SDKs and resources to accomplish this.

To start, we recommend that you have a subscription dedicated for your Azure Marketplace publishing, allowing you to isolate the work from other initiatives. Once this is done you can start deploying your SaaS application in this subscription to start the development work.

The best Azure Active Directory documentation, samples and guidance are located at the following sites:

For video tutorials, review the following:

Free Azure Active Directory training is available at

In addition, Azure Active Directory provides a site to check for Service Updates

Using Azure Active Directory to enable trials

Microsoft authenticates all Marketplace users with Azure AD, hence when an authenticated user clicks through your Trial listing in Marketplace and is redirected to your Trial environment, you can provision the user directly into a Trial without requiring an additional sign-in step. The token that your app receives from Azure AD during authentication includes valuable user information that you can use to create a user account in your app, enabling you to automate the provisioning experience and increase the likelihood of conversion. For more information about the token, see Sample Tokens .

Using Azure AD to enable 1-click authentication to your app or Trial does the following:

  • Streamlines the customer experience from Marketplace to Trial.
  • Maintains the feel of an 'in-product experience' even when the user is redirected from Marketplace to your domain or Trial environment.
  • Decreases the likelihood of abandonment on redirect because there is not an additional sign-in step.
  • Reduces deployment barriers for the large population of Azure AD users.

Certifying your Azure AD integration for Marketplace

You can certify your Azure AD integration in a few different ways, depending on whether your application is single-tenant or multi-tenant, and whether you are new to Azure AD federated single sign-on (SSO), or already support it.

For multi-tenant applications:

If you already support Azure AD, do the following:

  1. Register your application in the Azure portal
  2. Enable the multi-tenancy support feature in Azure AD to get a 'one-click' trial experience. More specific information can be found here.

If you are new to Azure AD Federated SSO, do the following:

  1. Register your application in the Azure portal
  2. Develop SSO with Azure AD using OpenID Connect or OAuth 2.0.
  3. Enable multi-tenancy support feature in AAD to get 'one-click' trial experience More specific information can be found here.

For single-tenant application, use any of the following options:

  • Add users to your directory as guest users using Azure B2B
  • Manually provision trials for customers by using 'Contact Me'
  • Develop a per-customer 'Test Drive'
  • Build a multi-tenant sample demo app with SSO

SaaS Subscriptions

Use SaaS app offer type to enable your customer to buy your SaaS-based, technical solution as a subscription. The following requirements must be met for your SaaS app:

  • Price and bill the service at a flat, monthly rate.
  • Provide a method to upgrade or cancel the service at any time. Microsoft hosts the commerce transaction. Microsoft bills your customer on your behalf. To use bill a SaaS App as a subscription, you must enable you own subscription management service API. Your subscription management service API must communicate directly with the Azure Resource Manager APIs. Your subscription management service API must support service provisioning, upgrading, and canceling.
Requirement Details
Billing and metering Your offer is priced at a monthly flat rate. Usage-based pricing and usage-based "true-up" capabilities are not supported at this time.
Cancelation Your offer is cancelable by the customer at any time.
Transaction landing page You host an Azure co-branded transaction landing page where users can create and manage their SaaS service account.
Subscription API You expose a service that can interact with the SaaS Subscription to create, update, and delete a user account and service plan. Critical API changes must be supported within 24 hours. Non-critical API changes will be released periodically.

Next Steps

If you haven't already done so,

If you're registered and are creating a new offer or working on an existing one,