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Dear Customers,

it was a long way to go, but now we finished migrating all our documentation about our sync and share clients and file cloud web, from our old wiki system to our new documentation platform. As a new central point of entry to our synchronization client, cloud web and server documentation you can now use:

https://wiki.powerfolder.com

While doing that, we not only shifted content, but also reworked a lot of content, making it easier to read and understand. Furthermore it has been updated to match our latest releases. We recommend system administrators to let your users know about that, since it will greatly help them to use our solution and even discover possibilities, they have never known about before, e.g. running the client as a system service, restoring previous file versions using the file archive, sharing files and directories via link, scheduling synchronization, and more…

In the next days and weeks we will also shift the remaining knowledge base content, which was yet another system, to that new platform, so every piece of documentation about our sync and share clients and servers can be found at one place.

If you have any comments or if you are missing certain pieces of documentation, let us know by contacting our support department.

Enjoy!

Intelligence services are reading your data – popular companies like Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are affected as well as some major e-mail-providers and Skype. Even politicians have been spyed on. Is that unavoidable? No. Everyone who works with PowerFolder minimizes the risk of data-spying.

The scandal is named PRISM, a program US authorities are using for analyzing on millions of user data. Apple recently admitted that they received and processed up to 5.000 requests by the officials – during the last six months alone. Facebook had 10.000 requests, 31.000 Microsoft accounts are affected. Just irrelevant numbers? Unfortunately not!

Companies are also working with those providers. For example the CEO uses Skype for the video-conference with partners overseas. External workers send e-mails to development divisions. The CFO saves his appointments in his Apple device. The strategic plan for the expansion in Asia resides in the cloud. And even middle-sized businesses have to rely on many of those providers – and might give their data out of hand.
Who – however – sends, organizes, saves and updates his data with PowerFolder is not a victim of the PRISM. PowerFolder has no servers in the USA, uses no unencrypted data transfer, works behind it’s own firewall and independently of external systems.

The consequences of the PRISM-scandal: The commission of the European Union is concerned, European parliaments are putting PRISM on their agendas. The german MP Wolfgang Wieland (Grüne) is quoted in “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (issue 2013/06/15) that it is a “spooky imagination“ that Americans are able to read along everything what is written, sent or posted in this country.

Another member of parliament, Hans-Peter Uhl (CSU), calls in the same newspaper:
“We must develop our own secure IT-Communication technology, no matter if German or European, so no American, and especially no Russian or Chinese intelligence agency can read along the communication of our state or our companies.”

This communication technology already exists! It is used by numerous German and European companies, research facilities, universities and even governments. It is a German software named PowerFolder.

PowerFolder allows you to share file links, files and sync folders the easy way on any device, with this comes a natural demand for more cloud space to store your files.

So we upgraded all products, which are hosted on our cloud and just doubled the Cloud Space of PowerFolder Cloud and PowerFolder Pro.

New Cloud Server Packages with  twice the Cloud space

Get the PowerFolder Business Cloud with twice the Cloud space

Get the PowerFolder Enterprise Cloud with twice the Cloud space

PowerFolder Pro with 100 GB

Get PowerFolder Pro with twice the Cloud space

PowerFolder Pro users who ordered in the last 30 days can contact us via email and we will upgrade their accounts to this new storage size.

As you might already know, we are delivering mature and quality sync, sharing and backup solutions since 2007. Following this path we just released the next version with a strong focus on stability and improved user experiences.

PowerFolder 8 Service Pack 1 is ready for download and brings the following improvements:

• Clients and servers now delivered with their own runtime environment
• Cluster environment improvements
• Creating directories in the web
• Improved Mac OS and Linux client user experience
• Performance and stability fixes
• Renaming files and directories in the web
• Reworked client preferences
• Reworked English/German client translations

Get Version 8 Service Pack 1

Simply download it and upgrade your existing installation:
https://www.powerfolder.com/download/powerfolder-server.html

Please check out our release notes for more information and
upgrade instructions:
https://wiki.powerfolder.com/display/PFS/Release+Notes

Special release offer

PowerFolder Business Suite 50 is discounted by 25% till the end of March 2013.

Use this code when placing your order in our shop to benefit from the special discount: LYR46E4VUJ5N

https://www.powerfolder.com/shop/products/PowerFolder-Business-Suite.html

Interested in trying our our solution?

Of course we offer trial licenses to check out technologies offered by us and get a first impression on them. Request a trial license here. To get quickly started, take a look on our detailed server documentation.

As you may already know we released major versions and hotfix versions to those major releases of our inhouse cloud file sharing products in the past. We now decided to change this release strategy as well as the release cycles to improve quality assurance as well as visibility of new features, changes and bugfixes.

Introducing new release cycles

The new strategy will now feature major releases and service packs to those major releases:

– Major Releases: Release every 4-6 months, including new major features.
– Service Packs: Release every 2-3 months, including improvements and bugfixes.

Both release types will be thoroughly tested by our quality assurance and made available to the public, including documentation and announcements via our customer mailing lists and blog. The new strategy will allow you to follow new releases more easily as they are not coming in short periods and without notification anymore, having more time to deal with your daily work instead of your private cloud. It will also help to allow our QA engineers to test new functionality and changes more deeply.

Introducing the Early Access Program (EAP)

The Early Access Program (EAP) will allow customers, who ordered a custom feature or waiting for a certain feature, to access them before the public release. Those releases will be tested by our quality assurance as well and introduced to the public in one of the above mentioned releases later on. This will allow us to gather feedback from our customers and continue to further improve new features in coordination with them to reach the best possible result and user experience.

The EAP doesn’t offer an open registration, therefore please contact us to get access.

First of all we like to wish everyone a happy new year! We’d like to thank all of our customers and partners for the fruitful and good co-operation in the past year, which helped us to greatly enhance our products.

Now the interesting part…a new year, a new version: PowerFolder 8

PowerFolder 8 now features a lot of new functions, which are improve the usage in small business up to enterprise-grade deployments:

• High-availability and load-balancing clustering, including a Server Maintenance Mode to perform updates on cluster servers while other servers still serving users. Furthermore the servers of the clusters are now listed in the web interface including statistics.
• Enhanced public link sharing for files and directories, including the possibility to set restrictions on the link (e.g. expiration date)
• Re-designed wide-screen web interface providing a fresh, modern look

Smaller features worth mentioning:

• Automatic log file rotation
• Improved instant change detection on 64-bit Linux systems
• Improved web interface texts/translations
• Possibility to define a storage path during folder creation in the web
• Reduced CPU usage and load on hosts and databases
• Shibboleth authentication (first draft/beta)

Read the full changelog here.

Interested in high-availability and load-balancing?

Of course high-availability and load-balancing not only requires our software to fully support those scenarios, but also the underlying technologies, like the database and storage systems. Of course we offer more information on this as well as consultancy services to assist you setting up such a solution. As a first start we recommend to read our clustering information wiki page. To dive more deeply into the topic, please contact us. We will be glad to assist you.

Interested in trying our our solution?

Of course we offer trial licenses to check out technologies offered by us and get a first impression on them. Request a trial license here. To get quickly started, take a look on our detailed server documentation.

PowerFolder has reworked the product lines, we now offer two major lines of products both product lines are available as inhouse / on-premise and cloud / SaaS versions.

The PowerFolder Business line which is providing a easy to use sync, backup and sharing cloud with all the features you need in a regular small and medium sized company.

• Details about Managed Business Cloud
• Details about On-premise Business  Cloud

Until the end of 2012 you will have a special offer for you:

All business products come with TWICE the licenses and in case you order a cloud solution also with TWICE the cloud space.

The PowerFolder Enterprise line which gives you all the features of the business line but adds extended support, central device administration, high-availability functions and everything you need for a large scale roll-out.

• Details about Managed Enterprise Cloud
• Details about Inhouse Enterprise Cloud

Have it your way – four words used by one of the largest companies in the fast food industry should describe their flexibility towards customers. The same slogan could also be used in combination with our products, since our software is not only used by our customers as a solution in the typical cloud sharing scenarios, but also to enhance flexibility  and productivity in small collaborating groups, medium and enterprise sized companies.

Therefore we now released new documentation of our server products on a modern platform. We not only updated the structure and contents, but now also provide guides for the most common synchronization scenarios, e.g. using PowerFolder Server to:

• Perform notebook and device backups
• Sharing directories between users
• Sharing directories on a file server
• Synchronize directories between servers

You think one of those usage scenarios could also be helpful in your company? Simply request a trial version of our in-house server, download it and get started synchronizing your world!

Of course there are many more possibilities on how to use PowerFolder Server. Contact us to learn more and get your problems solved easily.