Blogging Present.ly

We’re very pleased to be able to announce some great new features we’ve been working on for Present.ly that are being released today. These features are available immediately for all users.

Helping Those Who Help Themselves

First and foremost, the enterprise-ready behind-the-firewall version of Present.ly is now available as a self-service package that can be downloaded and installed for up to 500 users on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 5.

What does this mean for you? It means that you will be able to download, install, and run Present.ly on your own internal infrastructure without the need to contact support, go through a long sales cycle, or deal with quotes, waiting periods, or any other red tape. You can simply download, install, and start using Present.ly.

Each downloadable package comes with a 30 day unrestricted risk-free trial, giving you maximum flexibility to try Present.ly within your organization. For more information about the behind-the-firewall self-installation, visit the behind-the-firewall signup page.

A Real-Time Experience

Present.ly is a real-time collaboration tool, and today we’re announcing a great new feature to help you keep up with everything more quickly and easily than ever before. The new real-time feeds provide you instant updates not only from your home feed, but also your replies, direct messages, custom feeds, questions, urgent messages, and system announcements.

Switching between each of these feeds is as easy and fast as clicking on them, and each feed is immediately updated as new updates are posted. In addition, you can see the number of new updates in each feed as they arrive. This real-time interface provides more choice in how you view your updates as well as a faster experience.

Discover People in Your Network

When networks begin to grow, it can be difficult to always know who you should be following, especially for new members. Present.ly now has two features that help you find the right people to follow.

Suggested Contacts

With the new Suggested Contacts feature, Present.ly will look at the people in the network and recommend new people to follow based on a number of criteria, including how connected people in your network are to that person. This gives you an easy way to find those people that probably ought to be in your network but you just hadn’t thought to add them.

Address Book Import

Additionally, you can now import your contacts from GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Plaxo, or Microsoft Outlook and see which of them are on your Present.ly network. Take a shortcut to connecting to your contacts by using the Address Book Import feature!

The Little Things

In addition to the features listed above, we’ve released a number of small tweaks and improvements to make the overall Present.ly experience better. For instance, Present.ly now supports Gravatars for open accounts, providing an easier experience for new users who don’t have to upload a custom avatar.

If you want to share links quickly with everyone in your Present.ly account, you may now add a bookmarklet to your browser from the Links section to allow you to do just that.

Other additions include hovering over a user’s avatar to see his or her last three updates. Over the next week, we’ll be posting more details of the smaller features on this blog, so stay tuned.

We’re proud of the work that’s gone into this new release, and we hope you’ll take the time to try it out for yourself!

Recently, we announced our new feature that allows you to import feeds directly into your stream. We're continuing with the new feature trend this week by announcing our new Account Statistics available for all claimed accounts. To access it, just go to Admin, then choose 'Account Statistics' in the right hand menu.

Charts Galore

The new Account Statistics provides you with a nice amount of charts that should help you analyze the usage of your overall account, your individual users, or your account's groups. These charts are available in all detail levels within your account statistics. You can even view a map that shows the location of all the users within your account.

User & Group Specific Statistics

You may now dig into each individual user and group in your account and view their update trends. You can also view a table of all users or groups within your account and sort them by various metrics, such as their total number of updates, followers, followings, sign up or creation date, etc.



We will be continuing to add more metrics as time passes. Account Statistics is just another one of the useful new tools that are available for our claimed accounts. We'll be announcing more great new features soon, so stay tuned!

A feature that we've recently added to Present.ly allows any account to add custom external RSS feeds directly into one of your streams. You can add a stream just for your own account or you can even add a stream for one of your groups. We also give you the ability to make the imported stream public or private.



To add a new external feed for your own account, move your mouse over 'External' and choose 'Add New External Feed'. From there you can choose a name for your new feed, provide the URL, a description and other various options. Other users can even choose to subscribe to your feed if they would like to. If you are a manager of a group, you can add a feed from the your group's 'Settings' page.



Now you can subscribe to a user's Twitter stream, a Twitter search, or any other type of RSS feed. A great use of this feature is to stay on top of feedback about your company or your product within Present.ly.


We hope that you enjoy this new feature and be sure to check back soon for some great new feature announcements!

In the June 2009 issue of Inc. Magazine, Present.ly was mentioned as one of the best-bet collaboration tools for mobile users. It's becoming more apparent that companies need online collaboration tools that help alleviate the hassle of back-and-forth e-mail conversations and allow users to share information and documents. The article states that 22 percent of companies use real-time collaboration software and around 24 percent use document-sharing software, which Present.ly supports out of the box. It goes into detail on how to choose the right collaboration software for your company and provides real-life examples from different companies.

We are more than honored to be mentioned in a magazine that we all frequently read. If you get a chance, pick up the June 2009 issue of Inc. Magazine.

We are very pleased to announce that Present.ly has been nominated for the seventh annual AlwaysOn and KPMG Global 250 Competition! This truly is an honor as the AO Global 250 Competition nominates only the best and brightest emerging companies in the global marketplace in several categories. Our selection for the competition means that AlwaysOn and KPMG think that we are “demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology.” The winners are announced in July, and our fingers are crossed, but simply being nominated is an honor. Thanks AlwaysOn and KPMG!

We are honored to announce that we have been nominated for the Northern Virginia Technology Council Hot Ticket Awards! These awards recognize the hottest companies in a number of categories, and this year we are competing in the Hottest Bootstrap category. The announcement of winners will be held on June 24th, and all of us are truly appreciative of this nomination.

We are extremely excited to announce that Present.ly has been selected as a CNet WebWare 100 Winner in the Editor’s Choice category. The WebWare 100 is a list of the top 100 web applications of the year, and to be included as an editor’s choice is a great honor. Thanks to everyone who supported us in the voting and to all of our users for helping us get to this prestigious accolade.

This award shows the recognition that Present.ly is gaining as a tool for enterprise collaboration and a new way to collaborate with co-workers. This is going to be a great year for Present.ly and we have lots of big things planned, so stay tuned to this blog for some new announcements in the coming weeks.

As we celebrate our success, we would love to hear feedback from those who use our product to enhance their business communications. If you have suggestions or comments, feel free to send an e-mail to info@presentlyapp.com or just leave a comment on the blog!

Yesterday we made available a new feature for claimed accounts: the Administrator API. This provides a token and secret that will allow administrators to access the API as an arbitrary user in the network.

Why an Administrator API?

We want Present.ly to be able to integrate with as many of the services your organization uses as possible. Much of the time, these services are not going to allow for the storage of individual Present.ly usernames and passwords, making it difficult to impossible to have them automatically integrate with Present.ly.

The Administrator API allows you to, for example, post an update as any user in the network by logging into the API with the admin token and secret and specifying the user by username or e-mail in an admin_user parameter. You could tie this in to your project management tools or other services to notify Present.ly users when other services have experienced changes.

To view your administrator token and secret simply go to the “Account Settings” page of the Admin dashboard. Here you can see the current token as well as regenerate it if security concerns arise.

For more information on how to utilize the Administrator API, visit the Knowledge Base Article.

We want to make Present.ly a seamless part of your organization’s workflow. To that end we are excited to announce a new feature that is finally ready to enter beta: LDAP Integration! With LDAP, you can allow your employees to use the same credentials to log in to Present.ly that they use to log in to your other business services, making it easier and more secure by utilizing your existing processes. This is especially useful for large organizations with hundreds of employees, as replicated logins create a great deal of stress and extra work.

To utilize the LDAP integration in Present.ly an administrator of your network needs to go to the Admin page and click on LDAP Settings. The administrator should then fill out the form that appears:

For more detailed information about LDAP usage, visit the LDAP Knowledge Base Article on the Present.ly support pages. This feature is available immediately for all claimed networks. It is still considered a beta feature at this point, so if you have any questions, concerns, or problems don’t hesitate to contact support and we’ll work with you to improve the system.

Present.ly has been nominated as a finalist in the WebWare 100 Communication Category. We’re honored to be chosen from a pool of more than 5,000 applicants to be one of the 300 finalists to compete for the title.

The WebWare 100 is a yearly contest held by CNET that allows the public to pick what the 100 best web applications of the year are. Past winners included such products as GMail and Amazon MP3, so we’re very excited to be included as a finalist for this year’s selection.

Voting is open right now, so please vote for us! We think that business micro-communication is an important next step in the future of communication, and your votes will help validate that and move it even further into the mainstream. Thanks for your support.