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.

LDC Via and SAML

Last month we announced the release of “Eton Mess” which includes a number of nifty features and general improvements for the platform. One of the features which Eton Mess brings to the table actually dates back to one of our “Forced Rhubarb” point releases, and the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed it in the associated release notes:

Feature: SAML is now an option for organisations wanting to use it. Whoop!

Huge fanfare eh? :-) SAML stands for “Security Assertion Markup Language”, and we use it to provide Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality between an authentication service of your choice, and LDC Via.

Authentication services are known as “Identity Providers” (IdP) in the SAML world. The applications and platforms like LDC Via which take this authentication information and make use of it are known as “Service Providers” (SP).

In practical terms, this means that once the appropriate configuration has happened, an organisation can have its authenticated users proceed directly to LDC Via from their intranet or other corporate systems without a pesky log-in screen getting in the way.

SAML doesn’t mandate the method of authentication used, so Identity Providers just need to support the protocol (as do downstream Service Providers of course). This means that all manner of centralised identity stores can be used as IdPs; for example, Microsoft Active Directory and Google can both act as IdPs.

The good news is that with “Eton Mess”, if you have a SAML environment in mind for integration with LDC Via, we can work with you to make that a reality.

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' has arrived

We are delighted to announce the availability of our ‘Eton Mess’ release, as of Wednesday 8th June, nearly two years to the day since we first started creating LDC Via.

In case you’re wondering about the curious naming of our releases, we’ll let you into that secret in a separate blog post. Instead, for now let’s concentrate on a couple of the big headlines from this release.

Performance: the API now allows arrays of multiple documents to be ‘put’ in one call. This allows for much more efficient and performant applications.

Account limits: we have increased the account limits across all (well, all but one) of our tiers. The pricing has been tweaked too, to match. Overall, the new structure seems to fit our customers’ needs better, and that’s what it’s all about.

For a full list of all the lovely goodies we’re sending your way in this release, take a look at our hand-crafted artisanal release notes.