Announcing Zetetic Connect

2010-10-07 20:00:00 -0400

Today I'm very excited to announce Zetetic Connect, a fast, super-flexible way to get information out of (and into) LDAP directories and relational databases databases for the web, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android.

Connect grew from a need to publish Active Directory data to the web; so many businesses and schools rely on directory systems, but there just aren't a lot of mature applications that help people take full advantage of those directories or to spot and correct missing data. Connect does that and, going two steps farther, hosts an extremely robust, high-performance engine that can unify multiple directories and data stores behind the scenes, and allows users from any of those directories to sign in.

For example, if part of your company uses Microsoft Exchange, another division uses Lotus Domino, and you've just acquired a third group that uses Zimbra for messaging, Zetetic Connect can quickly create an online phonebook merging all three. Just launch Connect, search for "Smith", and you'll get the contact and organizational details for all the Smiths across all systems, live. The same powerful simplicity applies to contacts, groups and distribution lists, sites and locations, and virtually any other data in your directories. (Of course, you can choose what to include or exclude from each.) Users can easily maintain their own data, such as phone and mobile numbers, according to rules you define.

Your mobile users will be impressed by Connect's user interface, which is tailored especially for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android, and has the look and feel of a native application. (See: screenshots.) Connect is internationalization-friendly too, so your users get Connect in their native languages, top-to-bottom.

Behind the scenes, we've leveraged many years of directory experience to build an extremely robust framework that actively monitors your directory servers' performance and availability, so users won't notice if individual servers go out of service. Connect also does some pretty serious and smart caching and threading, and features a wealth of special optimizations for Active Directory. That said, it works great with any LDAP server, SSL on or off, and any schema.

You can even use the Zetetic Connect core as a pure-LDAP, federation-capable membership and role provider for any ASP.NET application, a topic upon which I'll touch in a future blog post.