FileGears - File Collaboration Made Simple

In order to make your working process more protected and safe, we just released the Trash Can feature. Files now are not deleted permanently when you click the Delete link in the control panel, but moved to the Trash Can and can be restored, if they are needed. You can delete files permanently in one click, if needed, by holding ALT key when you click the Delete link.

Drag and Drop is supported, as well. You can drag files to the Trash folder and drag files back from  the Trash folder into any folder.

Files in the Trash Can keep connection to the parent folders and follow the same permissions policy as they have in the usual folders. Thus, if you have no permissions to work with some folder, you will not see files deleted from this folder in the Trash Can.

Especially for those customers who use FileGears to store and share images, we just released Image Gallery view mode. You can enable this view mode as any other – in the folder View Settings popup window.

Image Gallery view mode works both in FileGears back-end interface and in web-published folders, so your guests can use it, as well. The only limitation – Image Gallery mode does not work for Internet Explorer 6. Web guests who use this browser version will not be able to see this option in the folder view settings.

Have fun!

Today we released a new feature - File Notifications. It allows you to stay notified about new, updated and deleted files and file comments. There are two ways to receive notifications from FileGears – by email or via RSS feed.

As the amount of folders in FileGears is virtually limitless, you may prefer not to get notifications about each file. We made the notifications configurable on the user account level, folder level and file level.

With FileGears File Notifications you can:

• receive notifications about each file
• receive notifications only from specific folders
• receive notifications from all folders excluding specific folders
• receive notifications only about specific files
• receive notifications about all files excluding specific

FileGears is smart enough to send you only one email message when multiple files are changed. If somebody upload 100 files, FileGears will send you a single email and enumerate all 100 files in it, instead of sending you 100 notifications.

Please read the documentation for more details about the Notifications feature.

Today we conducted a test of FileGears performance in respect of large quantities of folders, files and users and took some measures improving the database efficiency. For the test we used the following conditions:

• 1000 folders (with nesting level = 4)
• 100 users
• 1 000 000 files (virtual files, no actual files on the disk)

In general, FileGears managed the test stress well. The application remains responsive during folder and file navigation, including moving between folders, expanding and collapsing folders, and switching from one page to another in a file list.

We found that the folder permissions popup window tends to slow down with large number of system users and so we performed a minor optimization in the permission management user interface. Now Edit Folder and Folder Users popups loads very fast.

Today we published a new feature allowing you to email files to your team-mates or friends directly from FileGears. Select files you want to email and click Email Selected. Then enter a recipient list, as comma separated email addresses, include subject and message and click Send button. Files that you selected will be attached to the email message.

You can use Email Selected feature in any folder where you have at least “Read only” permissions, and from the search results page, as well.

For system administrators there is a way to limit total size of files which system users can attach to a single message. We have added a corresponding field to the Email Settings page (Settings  Email Settings).

Of course, you can leave the field empty if you do not need any limits.

Enjoy!