Patent ID: 7519672

Claim:
A method for conducting a transaction in an on-demand computing environment comprising: providing transaction-oriented process software in a shared file system configured: to provide one or more designations of proxy recipients related to an original recipient, to provide one or more redirection rules indicating conditions under which said designated proxy recipients are to be sent redirected instant messages, said redirection rules containing at least one rule besides a rule to forward all instant messages, to receive an instant message directed towards said original recipient from a sender, to evaluate said redirection rules, to send said received instant message to a designated proxy recipient according to said redirection rules, and to suppress instant delivery of said received instant message to a user interface associated with said original recipient; executing said transaction-oriented process software in an on-demand computing system wherein transactions provided by said transaction-oriented process software are automatically shared by serving plurality customers; differentiating and recording usage for each of the plurality of customers of said transaction-oriented process software according to one or more parameters included in said transactions, said parameters uniquely identifying each customer and a type of transaction conducted for that customer; providing transaction processing capacity to said customers using a pay-as-you-go billing process in which charges are posted for actual computing resource consumption, said pay-as-you go model metering resource consumption by units of consumption including processor units of time, number of processor operations, number of transactions completed, network bandwidth utilized, memory usage, storage usage, and number of communications packet transfers completed, wherein said pay-as-you-go billing process further comprises: collecting by a billing server from a transaction server service consumption measurements for said customers, periodically summing said collected measurements for each of said customers, multiplying said summed measurements by a unit cost factor to determine a total service cost for each said customer, and posting said total service costs to at least one banking account server payment; and responsive to a number of transactions to any one server exceeding a measured aggregate capacity limit including a maximum network bandwidth, a maximum memory usage, and a maximum storage usage, automatically accessing one or more additional servers to increase the capacity and to share the workload.