Pydio Cells 1.4.0 - UX Revamp, new features and performances

This important release greatly improves performances and provides new powerful features and many bugfixes.

UX Revamp

In our constant quest for clarity and simplicity, we have reworked the end-users interface to gain space and flatness. The new home page focuses on the search engine, and otherwise displays recently accessed items, user bookmarks and eventually user Cells.

When inside a workspace, the top toolbar takes less space and is less present. Users can still revert to the previous style by changing the theme in their profile.

Performances

With Cells being rolled out more and more in production environment, we started to identify possible bottlenecks leading to scalability issues.

• We reworked the scheduler persistence layer (jobs vs. tasks vs tasks events), as it could lead to very long load time of the scheduler board, as well as huge memory consumption due to the underlying BoltDB storage.
• Fixed People listing filtering (could lead to wrong pagination when filtering e.g. on shared users)
• Fixed an implicit time limit leading to incomplete archives when downloading a folder as Zip for more than 10 minutes
• Added a generic OperationUuid to the logs to list events for a particular operation
• [ED] New tooling for monitoring processes (see Enterprise Distribution section).

Using Cells behind a Proxy

Common configuration issues were reported when exposing Cells behind a reverse-proxy, linked most of the time to a misunderstanding of our "bind" vs. "external" URLS. We reworked the install form to make it more explicit, and added some tricks in our own internal proxy to avoid "Signature Mismatch" errors on some S3 queries.
Installing behind a proxy should now be much easier! See our Knowledge Base for tips&tricks about settings Cells up behind a reverse proxy.

Enterprise Distribution New Features

Shares Audit Reports

Pydio Cells Enterprise now provides a dedicated tool to gather all information about shared data inside the application. This report allows admins to browse all Cells, Workspaces and Public Links on all datasources, with an ability to filter these resources by owner, filetypes, visibility, etc.

Admins can also list the users recent activity extracted from auditable logs directly inside the user editor in the admin Console.

DevOps Monitoring via Prometheus

We added support for exposing internal metrics to a Prometheus server, and we will publish it ready to be used on Grafana dashboard and imported.

This is really cool to monitor your installation (memory, goroutines, scheduler tasks running, etc), we will add more metrics as time goes by.

Migration Tool from Pydio 8 (Beta)

This new import tools allows you to create a brand new Cells installation from an existing Pydio 8 servers, by importing Users/Groups/Roles, mapping old workspaces to Cells datasources and workspaces, files metadata, shares, etc.

Given its number of features, every Pydio 8 install is unique, and we will need to crash-test this against real life usecases.This tool is thus currently in BETA, and our paying customers are welcome to contact the support for guidance on the migration process (the import tool does not modify anything in the existing P8 installation).

Other fixes

• Prevent admin user from deleting herself or her own group.
• Improved various search form issues: Filesize (add unit picker), Extension (needs a trailing dot), Date (cannot empty field), etc.
• Added missing GetUser() method declared in OpenAPI spec but not implemented.
• Fixed UX permission issue when sharing a single file with "Edit" permission (editor was still opened as readonly).
• Fixed race condition in UX when loading Actions (empty 'New ...' submenu).
• Prevent multiple clicks when creating Cells on slow network.
• Prevent ugly login dialog appearing on public links after a while.
• Prevent re-opening of editors in a strange state after a logout.
• Roles "Always Override" incorrectly wired (added a new column in DB).
• [ED] Fix various issues on Cells Console dashboard graphs.
• [ED] Naming conflict breaking colors branding.
• [ED] Add ability to edit Scheduler jobs frequency.

Upgrade

Upgrade should appear in the administration Console. Run the upgrade to download latest binary and restart Cells. Do not forget to run the 'setcap' command on the new binary if you are binding to port 80 or 443!