Filr 1.1 – Just Around the Corner!

Novell Filr 1.1 is just around the corner – all reports are that it will be generally available near the end of August. This is great news as this release brings amazing performance and scalability enhancements to an already solid product.

Adaris has successfully deployed Filr with multiple customers over the past year. Although these customers have been happy with it, there have been some minor issues with performance, mostly due to the fact that customers have decided to expose entire file systems instead of specific folders.

Here’s why: because Filr is a solution that is deployed inside your corporate network, it allows the organization to expose any folder on any network file share to Filr users. This is great for users, as they can then have secure access to their files from anywhere, on any device. What’s really cool about Filr is that it reads and respects the file system permissions already in place, so users only have access to what they would normally see when connected locally to the network with their PC. Now, because this works so well, most customers – instead of exposing only certain folders that users may need to access from their mobile devices – decided to expose entire shares to Filr users! Millions of files and terabytes of data. The reasoning was that, “If Filr respects the file system rights, then I’ll just expose the whole share and users will only see what they have access to, right?”

Well, yes – and it worked great. Of course, it meant that a lot of synching was going on, and sometimes that impacted performance. You could say that Filr was a victim of its own success.

So the developers at Novell looked at what customers were doing, what was happening on the appliances, and got to work. The result: Filr 1.1!

Customers that are already happy with 1.0.1 should be thrilled with 1.1 – we know of several customers deploying it for 4000-5000 users that certainly will be!

So if your organization has been looking to provide Dropbox-like features to your users, but without any clouds involved, then it’s time to take a serious look at Novell Filr. Contact us for more info or a demo.

WHAT’S NEW

Here’s a look at what’s new in the upcoming release:

User

• Enable/disable file downloads, Enable\disable Web access
• User preferences – Manage Web access file action – HTML or View details or Download

Groups

• Enable/disable personal storage, Enable/disable file downloads, Enable/disable Web access, Desktop settings, Mobile app settings
• Support duplicate groups
• Name completion setting display (how group name is displayed – title or CN name)
• Ability to disable sharing to LDAP groups

Web Application Configuration

• Enable/disable file downloads
• Enable/disable web access Mobile Application Configuration
• Disable Cut/Copy
• Disable screen capture (android only)
• Disable file access if rooted or jail broken device – Open-in whitelist applications
• Filr data wipe (schedule)

LDAP Configuration

• New UI
• Preview sync
• LDAP browser (LDAP browse to select containers, proxy users)
• User Home Directory Net Folder Configuration options (custom criteria variable, home directory attribute, specific LDAP attribute, do-not create home directory netfolder)

Share Settings

• Whitelist/Blacklist external email address and domains

Net Folders

• Performance, Scale Improvements
• Ability to show Home folders in Net Folder listing
• Show Sync Status/Statistics
• Control Node to sync
• DFS support (Windows, OES)
• Sync controls – sync directory structure only option (improves performance), refresh cached rights interval
• Net Folder Server Type setting (Windows, OES, NetWare)
• Net Folder Server Authentication Type setting ( Kerberos, NTLM, Auto detect, NMAS)

Filr and folder sharing

• E-mail Filr Link – will open a Filr email dialog
• Copy Filr Link – will generate a sharing link – user can then copy link anywhere they please.
• Mailto Filr Link – will launch default email client on desktop and place a Filr link in the body of the email.

Download file(s)/folder as a ZIP

Personal preferences

• File Link Action – view as HTML, view details, download/open

Drag/Drop files from desktop to upload (browser must support HTML 5)

Appliance Configuration

• Field Patch – deploy/install support patches via console, display list of applied patches
• Storage – ability to expand partitions
• Storage – ability to use CIFS share for /vashare
• Support – automatically upload support config to Novell FTP site (provide SR# optional), download support config files to local machine
• Simplified upgrade process
• Multi-NIC support