Service Plans Database Overview

The provisioning system which is part of the solution includes a Service Plan database and several sample service plans. The following section describes them.

The Service Plan database provides a mechanism for storing and tracking the following key aspects of users and organizations in a provisioning environment:

The following sections explain the logical entities and their purpose in this data model.

Customers

The Customers entity is a generic data store that will store any kind of customer - organization or user. In the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 context, customers are described as Consumer Users, Business Organizations, and Business Users.

Definable types indicate what sort of customer the record represents. A Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) is stored in the record which relates the record to an Active Directory directory service object. This ensures that the relationship between customer data in the plan database and Active Directory is not lost due to changes such as OU or user name changes. Details beyond the GUID, plan assignment, and status are not stored here to avoid replicating data already in Active Directory.

Service Plans and Features

A Service plan represents a collection of services that a customer can sign up for. An example might be a GLod plan that offers premium Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA) features, including:

Service plan features are the individual components of a service plan. As in the preceding example this might include:

Available Service Plans

Service plans that are available to an organization's users can be limited by assigning a set of available service plans to a customer organization. For example, a customer organization may only have plans that include Outlook Web Access (OWA) features and no MAPI features.

Events represent an action that has been taken on a customer which may constitute a billable event. Examples of events include the following:

Service Plan Categories

Service plan categories allow the definition of subsets of service plans. If, for example, you only want to display a certain group of service plans to consumer users, you might define a Consumer Plans categories and assign the relevant service plans to this category.

Customer Assets

The customer assets table stores mapping between customers and various assets such as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) domains, Web sites, and so on.

Types

The Hosted E-mail Namespace implements a service plan for Exchange Mailboxes using the generic service plan schema. This service plan implements several events, asset, status, and feature types.

Event Types

Event types define uniquely named events. When a provisioning event occurs, an event is logged to the events table with one of the following types:

Status Types

Status types define uniquely named status types. Status types are used to indicate the status of many of the data entities in the schema. For example, when a customer is deleted, the row is not removed from the database - rather the customer record is marked with a status of deleted.

The following is a list of status types.

Asset Types

Asset types define uniquely named asset types. Asset types are used to define the type of assets that are stored in the customer assets table. The customer assets table stores mapping between customers and various assets such as SMTP domains, Web sites, and so on.

The following is a list of asset types.

Customer Types

Customer types define uniquely named customer types. Customer types are used to identify the type of entity a customer is in the customer table.

The following is a list of customer types.

Feature Types

Feature types define uniquely named feature types. Feature types are used to define features that will be added to a service plan. A feature type encapsulates the Active Directory, Exchange, or Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) attribute that is used by the Hosted E-mail Namespace logic to create and configure users.

Each feature type includes the following fields:

Exchange Server 2007 Feature Types

The following list defines feature types.