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The iPhora Journey - Part 13 - Automating the Automate

This post was to be the final post of our "The iPhora Journey" series and summarize our entire journey and what we created.  However, as I was preparing the final post I realize there was one item that I hadn't discussed. That is the experience of purchasing a product and installing it onto a Domino server. So, Part 14 will be the final post of this series.


Whether you are purchasing a product that you really want or paying bills online, purchasing services or products online has become the norm.  For a new product launch we wanted this easy-to-buy and deploy experience.


Depending on the version of our product, different features are enabled. If a customer wants to upgrade the product to a more advanced version, the experience should be as easy as signing up for the upgrade, paying and the new features should available in the customer's installation. This is expected for most public cloud-based solutions. However, not so easy for private cloud/on-premises solutions.


Normally, it requires new downloads, configuration by the administrator, maybe installing new software and more configuring and testing.  This can create a significant barrier to entry especially for SMEs whom may not have the resources.


So, our goal was to create this easy-to-buy experience for our private cloud/on-premises solutions.


You can breakdown the experience into three areas:

  • Registration and payment
  • Licensing
  • Distribution and deployment


The original plan was to create a custom solution or license a technology that is already available to make this work. But why, we already have an extremely powerful automation platform that we created, iPhora Automate.

It was time to Eat Your Own Dog Food.

In creating these processes, we discovered more gems that are available within Domino with some capabilities we never knew existed. But that is a discussion for a future blog post.

Each of the above processes involve a series of steps and approval processes.  For example, during the registration process, a user fills out and submits a form with their information. This triggers an email notification to the user with a verification code that they enter into the verification form to confirm that they are who they claim. Upon verification, a number of asynchronous and synchronous processes are triggered. Some of these processes launch ActionStreams that create entries into the CRM App that we created and some create a user account into the customer portal where a user will get their license key and download the product.

The license key is then used during the installation process to determine what features are available to the customer. There are many other processes that are launched during installation to provide this smooth easy-to-buy customer experience that we all come to expect.

We are far from done. There are many aspects of the buying process that we are still designing and working on like connecting internal and external services in order to provide customers the best experience in purchasing and deploying our products.

Finally, next time the final post of "The iPhora Journey".


The iPhora Journey - Part 11 - Integration to Cloud-based Services for Business Users Made Simple
The iPhora Journey - Part 10 - ActionStream - the Heart of iPhora
The iPhora Journey - Part 9 - Flow-based Programming for Your User Interface
The iPhora Journey - Part 8 - Flow-based Programming
The iPhora Journey - Part 7 - Transforming Domino with Microservices
The iPhora Journey - Part 6 - An Application, Rethinking and Redefining
The iPhora Journey - Part 5 - Dammit Jim, I'm a LotusScripter not a JavaScripter
The iPhora Journey - Part 4 - JSON is King - The How
The iPhora Journey - Part 4 - JSON is King - The Why
The iPhora Journey - Part 3 - Creating an Integrated UI Framework
The iPhora Journey - Part 2 - Domino, the Little Engine that Could
The iPhora Journey - Part 1 - Reimagining Domino


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