Symptoms

Provider/Reseller wants to sell a Service Plan that includes the option to add several applications (eg. Cloud Bundle), but where applications are not shown in the Customer Control Panel until such time that a customer orders them.

When the customer does order the application services, the application must be autoprovisioned as normal.

Including the application in the service template (with limit=1) but with autoprovisioning=off is thus not an option.

Example Scenario

Service plan contains 2 applications; Shared Webhosting and Microsoft Office 365. Shared Webhosting is included in the plan, but Microsoft Office 365 licenses must be ordered as additional resources by the customer. Until such time that the customer orders a Microsoft Office 365 license, the application must not show in the Customer Control Panel. When the customer orders a Microsoft Office 365 license, then the Office 365 application must be automatically provided along with the license--at which point the APS will show in the Customer Control Panel

Configuration

In order to make this work, the following configuration items must be done.

Create Resource Types and add dependencies

  1. Create the Resource Types in PBA (composite resource) for the application service(s)
  2. Create the Resource Types in PBA (composite resource) for the application.
    1. Add a dependency of the type 'provided by' to the application service(s) that should cause the application to be provisioned.

Create Resource categories

  1. Create resource category for application resources
    1. Add application resource types
    2. Set application resource type to 'Default resource'
    3. Optional = Yes
  2. Create resource category for application service(s) resources
    1. Add application services resources

Create Service Plan

The service plans should be created to include the Application Resource as a Resource Rate with the values; Included=0, Min=0, Max=Unlimited, Show in CP=No, Show in Store=No. The Application Resource should not have a price associated with it.Configure the other resource rates as normal.

Result

Now when the customer buys a subscription with the service plan, but does not order additional resources, the APS will not show up in the Customer Control Panel (as there is no instance created yet). Only when the customer 'buys additional resources' (for the application service) will the application instance itself be created and shown on the Customer Control Panel.

Note: When ordering 3x application service, the CCP will also create 3x application. This is a limitation of POA, who cannot translate the dependency in such a way that 2+ resources only provision the applictation once. This is not an issue however, because 1) the resource isn't priced and 2) the APS interface knows it can only provide the instance once per subscription.

Internal content