Announced at MWLUG: LDC Via partnership with PSC Group

PSC Group and LDC Via have entered into a strategic partnership. Under this partnership PSC Group will adopt LDC Via as a platform for customers seeking to migrate data and applications away from legacy IBM (Lotus) Notes & Domino, and also as a preferred platform for the development of new software applications that might otherwise have been developed on Domino.

Why has PSC Group adopted LDC Via?

• Satisfy client needs for a low-risk migration strategy
• Create a modern application development platform
• Familiar REST-based API model
• Familiar security model for Domino applications
• Best-of-breed data migration tools

LDC Via provides a cloud-based managed database platform that emulates key features of IBM Domino in order to lower the barrier for transfer of both data and skills. The tiered monthly pricing model of LDC Via, with no minimum commitment, makes it a very cost-effective replacement for Domino. For larger customers bespoke pricing, dedicated installations, and on-premises options, are available: contact LDC Via for more details.

PSC Group is a global professional services and information technology consulting firm headquartered in Chicago.

LDC Via and PSC Group look forward to sharing more about our partnership and the application roadmap we are building together.

LDC Via has been selected as a G-Cloud 8 supplier

We are delighted to report that LDC Via has been awarded a place as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) supplier on G-Cloud 8, the Crown Commercial Service’s public sector procurement framework for cloud-based software and services in the UK.

G-Cloud 8 is the latest stage of the UK Government’s plans to create a digital marketplace; it provides an online catalogue from which public bodies are able to select approved IT services in a simple and cost-effective manner.

Read the full press release here.

See LDC Via’s full G-Cloud 8 listing.

MWLUG 2016

Mark Myers, our very own Wookiee, is now in Austin, Texas for the MWLUG conference which kicks off in earnest today. LDC Via is again a sponsor, and has a booth in the product showcase (Four Seasons Ballroom). Come and see Mark, talk about Via, and be sure to check out his presentations too:

• SA112: The SSL Problem and How to Deploy SHA2 Certificates (with Gab Davis from The Turtle Partnership) Ballroom D, Thursday 1pm.
• IN104: Salesforce for Domino Dogs. San Jacinto West, Thursday 5pm.

Psst… Be sure to ask Mark about our upcoming news!

Eton Mess pricing model

As well as the technical and feature improvements in the recent “Eton Mess” release of LDC Via, there’s one further change: we have tweaked our pricing model in response to customer feedback. The general picture is that everything has got bigger: so we’ve increased the data volume boundaries at which you move from one price level to another, and with that we have also revised the price bands to reflect the additional capabilities.

In detail:

“Basic” level - stays £FREE

This is still free, and still has a limit of 500 docs across two NSFs, but the total storage available has gone up from 500Mb to 1Gb. That change allows for testing with lots of large attachments, which is of course not an unusual scenario in Notes/Domino applications.

“Standard” level - £199/month (old price £99/month)

The storage available on this level has risen from 2Gb to 10Gb. That’s 5x the capacity, for twice the price.

“Pro” level - £499/month (old price £299/month)

The storage available on this level has risen from 10Gb to 25Gb. Which is 2.5x the previous capacity, in exchange for a 67% price increase.

“Enterprise” level - £999/month (old price £749)

The storage available at this level is unchanged at 100Gb, although the price here has increased by 33%. But it still represents a per-storage-Gb saving of almost 50% when compared to the “Standard” or “Pro” levels. And at “Enterprise” level there are no limits on the number of documents stored - the only thing we cap is the total storage space used.

For full details of pricing, and information about our “Dedicated” and on-premises offerings, see our pricing page

Eton Mess was released on June 8th. A full list of all the lovely functionality in this version can be found in our release notes.

Eton Mess API changes

A large portion of our time is spent writing applications that use LDC Via as a back-end. As we do more and more development, we identify improvements to the API that will make our lives (and, therefore, the lives of our customers) easier.

In our most recent “Eton Mess” release there have been several changes to the API, but we thought we’d concentrate on just two key updates for now:

The first is a completely new API method dbacl, which returns a list of all people in your organisation who have access to a specific database. By way of example, this method recently proved useful in determining to whom new document notifications should be sent.

The second change we want to highlight is an update to the API methods which allow the storage of unstructured metadata.

Eh? What? Why?

We’re currently writing a new application and we needed to store various settings for the application somewhere, but didn’t really want to create a new database just for this. We can now store those little switches and bits of information about the app in the database details and cache them as required. Handy!

If you want to make use of this new feature, we’ve updated the API documentation to tell you how: set database details.

We’ve said this many times, but it still holds true: we don’t have any hidden APIs. If we discover something that we need then we’ll create a new API and publish it for everyone to use. So, whatever we can do with the LDC Via platform, anyone else can as well. And we’re always looking for ways to improve things: if you have any ideas, please let us know.

Eton Mess was released on June 8th. A full list of all the lovely functionality in this version can be found in our release notes.