• Read more about Presently is LDAP-ready

If you are an administrator of a large enterprise with thousands of users and hundreds of business units, one of the most challenging tasks you are facing is how to manage those users and groups across hundreds of applications. It would be a nightmare to create users and groups one-by-one in your presently account, not to mention associating all the users with the right groups.

If you are an administrator who worries about sensitive login credentials duplicated everywhere, or you are a user who hates to remember different user names and passwords for all the applications your company has, you might be hesitate to create yet another account for presently.

Now those worries are over, Presently proudly announce that it is LDAP ready. Since most large enterprises already has directory services in place that supports LDAP, while for smaller organizations, setting up an OpenLDAP server or Microsoft Active Directory is quite easy.

Just in case you are hearing about LDAP for the first time, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open standard that provides an extendable architecture for storage and management of directory information. Widely accepted and fast-growing, LDAP has become the de facto industry standard for accessing directory information over a TCP/IP network. For more details, please visit "LDAP Wiki":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Directory_Access_Protocol .

Let us see what you can achieve by integrating your existing LDAP service with Presently:

* Account admin can easily batch import users and groups from LDAP
directory.
* Users are associated with groups automatically during the import
process according to your organization structure.
* Utilize LDAP to authenticate users directly instead of using local
accont credentials. So no sensitive login credentials are stored locally. And for users it means no more extra logins to remember.
* New user will be added on-the-fly during the authentication process, if his account information has not yet been imported.
These features help to eliminate all the administrator's headaches , and improve users' experience with Presently.

Here is how you can setup LDAP for your account:

1. Login as an admin user of your account.
2. Go to admin tab and click LDAP Settings on the right menu bar.
3. Enter your LDAP information in the following LDAP Settings Form.
4. Save the settings after you finish.

Definition of terms in the LDAP Settings Form:

* __Enable__: Enable LDAP on your account.
* __Server__: Type the IP address of the LDAP directory. Use either the host name or dotted decimal format.
* __Port__: Type the TCP/IP port on which the LDAP server will accept a connection from an LDAP client.
* __Encryption__: Select the communcation encryption method, can be "No Encryption", "SSL" or "StartTLS"
* __Authentication__: If your LDAP server allow anonymous access select "None", otherwise select "Simple" and provide Bind DN and password.
* __Bind DN__: Type the distinguished name (DN) of the directory administrator that allows presently to update information. You must use the LDAP string representation for distinguished names (for example, cn=Chris Smith,dc=intridea,dc=com ).
* __Password__: Type the directory administrator's password.
* __LDAP User Auth.__: Enable LDAP user authenticate for this account.
* __User search base__: Type the distinguished name (DN) of the entry in the directory information tree (DIT) under which user information is stored. You must use the LDAP string representation for distinguished names (for example, ou=people, dc=intridea,dc=com ).
* __Group search base__: Type the distinguished name (DN) of the entry in the directory information tree (DIT) under which group information is stored. You must use the LDAP string representation for distinguished names (for example, ou=groups, dc=intridea,dc=com ).
* __User unique ID name__: Type the user id name defined in LDAP user object schema. Usually it's 'uid', or 'sAMAccountName' for Microsoft Active Directory.
* __Group member ID name__: Type the group member name defined in LDAP group object schema. Usually it's 'member'.

Please email ping_at_intridea_dot_com for questions, suggestions or comments.

• Read more about Present.ly and XMPP

Along with the launch of Presently.com, we quietly revamped the backend architecture of Present.ly to better use the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) as the standard message delivery system. You may have noticed near-instant updates on the new web interface — this is primarily due to the super-fast messaging features of eJabberd, the XMPP server that Present.ly runs on.

We believe that XMPP will play a bigger role powering dynamic, real-time web applications in the coming years and have previously blogged as such. While most people in the industry know of XMPP only in its instant messaging role, the fact that there are fully fleshed out specifications for most common enterprise messaging problems as subsets of the XMPP specification is often sadly overlooked.

So what does this mean for Present.ly? In the short term, as you may have already noticed, you will see a major speed improvement posting and receiving updates. In the long term, we are planning on making our user interface a lot more dynamic — details are top-secret at the moment. We are also working on moving over our notification systems completely to XMPP, which will result in you receiving update notifications more rapidly over all your devices. As we grow, we’ll be leveraging eJabberd’s high scalability (due to it being written in Erlang) to provide a seamless, quick user experience.

We are also actively contributing back to the open-source XMPP community. Read about ruby_bosh, the first Ruby library to handle BOSH sessioning in your Ruby applications. We have also made various stability and speed fixes to the stropheruby library, which is based on the libstrophe C library (announcement soon). Both are available on Github for general use. Intridea’s proud to be a part of the XMPP community, and will be heavily using and promoting the technology with both our products and services.

• Read more about Present.ly Native Applications For Your Desktop and Mobile Phone

You may have already noticed by following us on Twitter or just by clicking around on the site, but we've launched a number of Present.ly clients in the past weeks.

Desktop Application

First up is our cross-platform desktop application that runs on Adobe AIR. You can view your update stream, post updates and more from a simple interface. You can also get notified automatically as new updates come in.

This application is a great way to access Present.ly in a compact, always-on way right on your desktop. We will be rolling out additional features for the application in the coming weeks, but we're happy to be able to give people what they've been asking for since we launched.

Mobile Applications

We're also very excited to announce the release of our native mobile applications for Present.ly. Now you can use these applications to interact with your co-workers on your iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device anywhere you go. With these applications, you can update your status, view your main stream, view your replies, direct messages and more.

The iPhone application is based off the open-sourced Natsulion Twitter iPhone application. It is available for free in the App Store on iTunes. On the Android platform, the Present.ly application is based off of another open-sourced Twitter application, TwitterDroid. You can download the application for free at the Android Marketplace. The BlackBerry application can be downloaded by going to our BlackBerry page. From there you can enter in your e-mail address and we will send the application right to your phone.

For those of you who have another device not listed above, you can use our mobile web version of Present.ly. All you have to do is go to your account from your device's mobile browser to access the mobile web version of Present.ly. You can also interact with Present.ly through SMS, MMS, or e-mail. Depending on your carrier though, standard rates may apply. Go here to view a list of our supported mobile carriers.

An Open-Source Initiative

We believe strongly in open-source and supporting the open-source community. As part of that, all of the clients discussed today are open-source and available on GitHub. We hope that open-sourcing these applications will serve as a great foundation for building more cool things around Present.ly as well as giving the community the chance to beat us to the punch on improvements if they so choose.

• Read more about The Importance of External Downtime Resources

Back in the days when Twitter was going down early and often, the biggest complaint by users often wasn't that Twitter was down but rather that they didn't know what was happening or when it would be fixed. Thus the Twitter Status Blog was born, an externally hosted Tumblr that would be updated when they were having issues. GitHub did similarly after a recent bout of outages.

Why are such resources so important? Because ultimately it's not the fact that a service you want to use is unavailable that's a problem so much as the feeling of helplessness of something you want/need to use being unavailable with no hint as to why or when it will be back.

Case in point: today is Black Friday and Live.com is offering a 12 hour 40% cash back promotion with HP. I've been trying to get through for the past six hours with no success (the entire Live.com cashback section has been down for most of that time). This would be fine if I had any idea what the problem was, how I could ensure that I can get the cashback even with the site being down, or even a "sorry, you're out of luck." A call to Microsoft support simply directed me to an e-mail support form with no promise of resolution before the deal expires. Instead I'm a slave to my refresh button trying to get the deal during brief bouts of uptime.

So if you have a product that people depend on, make sure you have some ways to let people know what's happening without depending on your app itself. Present.ly, for instance, employs both a Twitter account that we monitor to quickly respond to any questions about service interruptions and a support site that is externally hosted and will continue to work even if Present.ly is down. It is only in the case of three independent services going down simultaneously that we will be out of luck.

Ultimately all that matters is that your customers are happy. You can keep them happy even in times of outage by making sure that they know that you're working on it, you know about it and you care about it.