PowerFolder 28.1: break permission inheritance, CAPTCHA without third parties, wildcard search
Service pack 1 of the 28 series is above all about more control over who sees what. On a subfolder you can now break the inheritance of permissions — the folder then gets access rights of its own, independent of the folder above it. HR records or draft contracts inside a shared project folder stay visible only to the people who actually need them. Before you break inheritance, a warning dialog lists who will lose access; a dedicated filter shows every folder with interrupted inheritance, and each step is written to the audit log. The rule applies the same way everywhere — in the web portal, over WebDAV and SMB/Samba, in search and for share links — and it travels with a folder when the folder is copied.
Shared subfolders become easier to work with: you can copy, move and rename them in the web portal without losing the share. Anyone invited to a folder through a group can now leave it on their own.
Security without outside services: as an alternative to Google reCAPTCHA there is a local CAPTCHA that runs entirely on your own server — no call to a third party, no data transfer, selectable by configuration. Password fields no longer show what is typed, administrators can no longer log in as other server administrators, and many bundled libraries were brought up to current, patched releases.
Search now understands wildcards (*) and exact phrases in quotes, searches globally across all folders — including subfolders with content of their own and across every server in a cluster — and the tag filter offers the tags that actually exist. Hits through a tag move up the ranking, and search terms with a hyphen are found reliably.
In the online editor (ONLYOFFICE and Euro-Office) earlier versions can be restored straight from the version history; avatar, recent files and creating new documents are wired in. A read-only mode for the document server can be switched on by configuration, and the JWT secret is managed in the admin preferences.
For administrators: subgroups are created right in the group editor, group lists show their members as a tooltip and load much faster, and subgroups take over the organisation of their parent group. The dashboard and the accounts menu can be hidden from organisation admins, the folder owner can be hidden in lists, and storage and cluster distribution are selectable in the web admin. The folder list loads noticeably faster, files can be dragged onto the recycle bin, and the file list sorts numbers the way people read them.
Anyone migrating from Alfresco now also brings over interrupted permission inheritance, profile pictures and departments; each workspace becomes an organisation with the site managers as its administrators, and the nightly runs retry a failed analysis instead of losing the night. The Android app gains a recycle bin and version-based synchronisation, and the desktop client now speaks Hindi and Thai as well.