After a silent launch last month we are proud to announce the official release of PowerFolder Server 5.0.
Below you will find an overview of the updates included, as always you will find the most comprehensive information on our wiki here!

New Features include:

- RADIUS / Federated EDU RADIUS connectivity
- News-stream of changes / Audit trail.
- Enterprise addon leaves beta and goes live. Centrally manage backups.
- Script after download. Automate processes after sync.

Improvements
-API functions added: query account data, change account permissions.
- Enhanced apps for iOS and Android. File upload added.
- License service connection is now highly-available.
- License and micro credits stats added to admin dashboard.
- Folder lists now show up much quicker in web portal.
- Connection speedup: Clients get much smaller folderlist now.

Full Patchnotes and update information available in the wiki here!

This build is the first publicly available, yet already very mature, fusion of our latest developments.
You will find both the new user-experience based on our new UI and also the new high-performance java-virtal-machine “JET” present in this latest client.

The new UI greatly enhances the user experience and gives you a very slick and effective way of using all the functions available within our world-class product suite.

The new JET-technology will greatly reduce memory loads even in the most extreme usecases, for example users synchronizing tens of thousands of files with a volume of dozens of GB will have a memory footprint reduction of 75% to 200%

Get it now from:
https://www.powerfolder.com/de/support/development-builds.html

It is possible for both PowerFolder Pro and also PowerFolder Server customers to update to this version if they want to experience the latest and greatest PowerFolder experience. Keep in mind that Server customers will need to manually configure their own Server-URL.

Unter http://www.gwdg.de/index.php?id=2542 können Sie die GWDG-Nachrichten direkt bei der GWDG als PDF downloaden.
Weitere Informationen über die GWDG sind ebenfalls direkt bei der GWDG verfügbar unter http://www.gwdg.de/index.php?id=ueber_uns

Wir bedanken uns bei der GWDG für die exzellente bisherige und zukünfigte Zusammenarbeit.

We hope you had a fantastic start into 2012!

Today we are proud to present our new client version 5.6.
It comes with a lot improvements and a gift for all free users:
We doubled the data limit from 1 to 2 GB in the free edition of PowerFolder.

The changes of version 5.6 in detail:

Improvements/New features

• Free edition can now sync up to 2 GB of data.
• New skins: PowerFolder 2012 “Blue Globe” and “Storm”:

• System tray icon: Shows a “OK” icons instead of “P” icon when the sync is ok.
• PowerFolders base path will fall back to default if not available, e.g. network drive.
• File browser shows better feedback messages if no files matches the search input.
• Chat popups now show the message and have a reply button.
• Improved and corrected LAN/VPN/Internet connection in complex network scenarios.
• Program update dialog now clearly indicates that the update is for PowerFolder.
• Activation by file not longer supported. Please always use online activation.
• Directory chooser now shows drive names.
• Debug log panel: CPU activity dump button added.
• Folderlist: Not longer shows icons on mouse hover.

Bugfixes

• Security: Fixed bug, which causes the client to sync if not yet logged in.
• Corrected handling of non-default paths of recommended folders.
• Information section now correctly opens in multi screen environment.
• It’s now possible to change the physical directory if it’s not accessible.
• Mac: Minimize to system tray also hides the icon in the program bar.
• Up- and downloads now break when files get excluded from sync.
• Corrected several wizard texts.
• Fixed UDT connection bug.

Download

• Regular edition
• Highly optimized edition – Reduced memory and CPU usage. Beta. Win only.

All students and teachers in Luxemburg will soon use software from Meerbusch, Germany. Corresponding orders were signed between the Centre de technologie de l’éducation (CTE) of the Ministry of Education Luxemburg with PowerFolder.

A gradual rollout of the software to all 45000 students and 12000 teachers is planned for Q1 2012. Teachers and students will be able to save all their data in a joint cloud-environment. Despite PowerFolder being German, all data remains in Luxemburg on the IT-infrastructure of the CTE, maintaining full control and sovereignty of all data.

Read full press release (EN)
German press release (DE)

As failures are common, when it comes to IT, we used the opportunity to gain a benefit from this situation and added improved redundancy to PowerFolder Server internal routines and our infrastructure hardware to avoid longer downtimes in the future.

Now we can serve also our customers with that benefit, since the development of stronger failover routines have also been implemented into our server software, which is running in several enterprise-scale environments. Furthermore we are happy to serve you with our knowledge about automatic failover scenarios, to help you implement them also in your distributed, but at the same time centrally managed PowerFolder cluster environment.

In detail we added:

• Automatic failover mechanisms, which result in improved availability for the registration & licensing service as well as database related transactions
• New hardware for our PowerFolder Server cluster, to stand by in case of malfunction

If you are not yet a customer, but searching for a reliable, centrally managed and distributed data backup or collaboration solution, our sales team will be happy to introduce you to the advantages of a PowerFolder Server cluster.

If you are affected by this problem indicated by a message like “PowerFolder.exe still running” we have a workaround for you.

Please download and install the upcoming PowerFolder version 5.6 optimized edition RC1.

Note: When later upgrading to the official release version (ETA: 2 weeks) your configuration will be preserved. (Release notes for version 5.6, Read more about the optimized edition)

Blessings and a fantastic year 2012 to you all.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

The technology introduced in the new client reduces the idle memory footprint from 200 to approximately 50mb while increasing overall performance. In medium to high load situations the new client is expected to use about 150mb with 50k files and a few dozen GB of data.

Beware that this is BETA and will install into a seperate folder, we do appreciate any feedback and suggestions.