This weekend we updated Joyent Connector, our award-winning collaboration suite, with some brand-spanking new functionality. Most of the functionality revolves around providing access to the Connector.
Winter Menu
It’s very important to us at Joyent that our applications match the workstyle of our customers. Connector’s access model was designed from the beginning to recognize that teams need to trust each other. During initial design this was dubbed, back in the day, “cubicle security”. If we are on the same team, I trust you not to come into my cubicle, or desk, and start erasing my whiteboard and tearing up my files. Connector operates that way. And it is just easier. Ever been on a file server where everyone does everything in the “public” folder? No doubt, Connector allows me to hide things from my team members if I need to, and expose them selectively to other team members; but the default is absolute transparency.
Multiple Team Membership
As previously mentioned, Connector now allows you to extend the team to members of other teams. This is an opinionated change for something like a collaboration suite that includes real IMAP/SMTP email. While most collaboration suites don’t allow for this cross-pollination of user accounts, Connector now does. You can be a member of your design firm, and be part of your accountant’s and printer’s Connectors. Connector recognizes most people are members of multiple teams. Access control meets workstyle.
Strongspace™ Functionality
We have taken the functionality of our popular Strongspace application and embedded it into Connector’s “Files” application. Strongspace is disk space on the network that is made strong by using encrypted protocols to access it. Strongspace folders are available using SFTP or HTTPS only. Now Connector can be used for secure backups.
Guest Users
And then there are times when you don’t want someone to be a team member, you just want them to be able to see a piece of data, or leave some data. Connector now supports this for the Strongspace folders in Connector “Files”. This feature will be extended in the coming weeks and months to encompass all the data types in Connector.
Spring Menu Preview
We have some very interesting applications and improvements coming this Spring. “Web” promises to make the hassle of serving websites (blogs, static files, wikis) for the non-technical person a thing of the past. “Lists”, which is a spreadsheet/opml editor/calculator for the rest of us, will provide a general-purpose, easy to use task/project manager. Finally, we will be rolling out virtual Jabber to all our customers with chat logs in “Chat”. No more proprietary chat. All this, in addition to the normal flight of bug fixes, enhancements and feature adds to our existing applications. It all works in the same way as the other applications in Connector. Same tag cloud, same easy access, same beautiful user interface. All for the same price.
The portions are getting, well, fatboy sized! Happy year of the Pig. The Golden Pig.
25 Comments
that’s nice and all, but what happened to ps pipe grep?
@Mike: ps pipe grep will be back next week. Ben, Jason and I have been very busy getting finished for some deadlines.
Awesome! Love the StrongSpace integration.
Thanks!
Everything looks really nice. I’m really looking forward to seeing Jabber support in the spring.
With the addition of web hosting and Strongspace, it looks like the connector is going to be the hub for all the Joyent-related services. Does this mean that one day there won’t be a separate TextDrive/Strongspace?
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Love the Strongspace integration and the coming Textdrive integration (yes!). What I want to know is when are the enhancements to the Mail app coming? Can I have PLEASE have a “Mark as Read/Unread” button?
Oh yeah, do you have any plans on creating an API for Third-party developers? I have this idea for syncing Contacts between the Connector and a Mac that I would LOVE to try to code….
Sorry, but I’ve got one more question: Can you explain why there’s Bingo Disk and Strongspace? I’m kinda under the impression that they fill the same need even though Strongspace can only be accessed via SFTP/HTTPS.
I seem to be spanish, all of a sudden.
No halbo español.
@Trevor: Corrent. Connector is what the name implies.
@ryan: Check your preferences.
@Frank: We’ll look at the Mark as Read / Unread button. I’m sure you’re aware that our email service is hosted IMAP, so you can use a “legacy” client such as Mail.app on the Mac, or Outlook, or Thunderbird to accomplish this today.
Views on the LDAP data are coming, and so you’ll have the “user API” for synching contacts to a client like the Address Book. OpenLDAP didn’t support this functionality. Part of the update yesterday was to switch to Sun Directory Server.
APIs for developers are in the works.
Re: BingoDisk and Strongspace. Today they are both storage. We have plans for BingoDisk which will take it beyond mere storage. Stay tuned.
I refreshed and it was in English again… It is set to “automatic”, I am actually learning spanish, so I sometimes have my keyboard set to spanish… Could that cause it?
Also, is the Strongspace folder linked to our actual strongspace account? Or is it just a folder within connector that has strongspace functionality?
Cheers
Since we’re discussing new features, any chance we might see openid.joyent.com rolled into the connector one day?
I know its not an official Joyent service, but it would be really neat to be able to login to any website using my connector account (which I’m usually logged into anyway).
Not to mention that the current openid.joyent.com desperately needs a facelift.
@ David: I already check my Mail using Apple’s Mail.app; It’s a cool and capable machine. But I ask for the “Mark as Read/Unread” for the times when I’m not using my laptop and happen to be in a campus or public computing lab where I wouldn’t have access to a Desktop Mail client. As it currently stands, if I log into the Connector in my browser and read messages, if I have a lot of mail (which I usually do), I have to go through and read each one, one by one. That takes too much time and effort.
In an instance like that, I’d just like to click a button to select however many number of messages that I’d like to select at one time, click the “Mark as Read/Unread” (or flagged) button and then go about doing whatever else I need to do inside the Connector. Other web-based mail clients naturally include this…I was just a bit confused as to why the Connector did not, so that’s why I’ve been asking for one.
Also, thanks for the info on the Contact app… can’t wait!!!
@ryan: not yet. @Trevor: yes, we’re doing more with openid.
The new features are nice. Unfortunately, all of the old Mail features are completely broken right now.
David, any idea when the Connector will be usable again? What is the plan to make sure that the “Spring Menu” doesn’t re-break everything all over again?
@Joe: we’ll look into it. Mail is working for me. I’ve asked support to look into your org.
@David: Thanks. Appreciate it. Although, according to the forums, it’s not just my org that’s been affected:
Mail in mail and Cannot Move E-mails in Connector and Mail Syncing Doesn’t Appear to Be Working. This is leading to a lot of unhappy customers: A walk through metaphor land.
I’ve included the links in case you haven’t been by the Joyent forums yet today.
Thanks again David. I do appreciate the attention and all of the long hours that everyone has been putting in lately.
don’t forget the “unable to send and receive email via smtp/imap over the past several hours” issue, with no response to tickets which are still unassigned and no response to forum posts. i’d link to it directly, but the textile help link doesn’t tell me how to actually do anything (linking), it only shows me the end-result of all the formatting and linking options. not much help at all.
@Joe: We are investigating the Mail situation. Monday will bring information and fixes.
@JoshR, it’s 3.45 pm on a monday here right now and we’ve been without mail for the past several hours. no imap, no smtp, no new email in the connector which would be too slow to use anyway and has has issues with nested frames when trying to display mail (as described above).
i really hope we don’t need to wait until tomorrow for acknowledgement of, information about, or actual fixes to these serious problems.
i’m only posting this here because it seems to be the only place joyent staff are actively checking for and responding to communication from their users.
@Tai, there was a DNS caching issue on joyent.net. It’s been resolved and smtp/imap service should be back to normal. We were aware it was during weekday business hours for many of our customers, and were working to resolve it as quickly as possible. I did not think it would be resolved today, hence my comment, but thankfully, I was incorrect.
Sorry to rain on your parade, David, but 2007 is not the year of the Golden Pig, at least not according to any Chinese chronology I can recall or lay my hands on. It is the Year of the Fire Pig. The last Year of the Golden Pig was 1971, and it isn’t expected to return until 2031, since it follows a 60 year cycle.
The BBC says it’s the year of the golden pig.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6368383.stm
From TFA: “2007 is the year of the fire (golden) pig” (see the sidebar). I declare you both correct.
This thread has some discussion on the point.