19 representatives of 14 organisations (including 13 NRENs) from 14 countries participated in the annual NREN FileSender meeting at TNC23 in Tirana, Albania on June 8, 2023. Here FileSender community enthusiasts – users and developers – met, exchanged their experiences and expectations, discussing priorities for the future.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed platform enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any person or machine. FileSender explicitly targets mass-usage and is built to service the 99% of users who have better things to do with their time than figuring out how to do large file transfer.
Jan Meijer of Sikt, the Norwegian NREN, and Chair of the FileSender Board, presented an overview of FileSender and the team, deployments in NREN space, finances and contributor contracts, current roadmap and state of development. Currently, there exist active contribution agreements with several NRENs: AARNet (Australia), ACOnet (Austria), CSC (Finland), GARR (Italy), HEAnet (Ireland) and SWITCH (Switzerland).
For more details you can download the presentation slides.
Update on status UX/UI redesign
The FileSender user experience and user interface is undergoing a thorough modernisation. Earlier work was done to enable the use of Bootstrap. Rogier Spoor of SURF, the Dutch NREN, spoke about the redesign process of the UX/UI: organizing all features, questionnaire on product use with feedback obtained from actual users, user experience (UX) redesign and delivering final UI design.
RNP, the Brazilian NREN, is contributing the actual implementation of the new UI. Sérgio Leal Fonseca of RNP showed a live demo of new FileSender UI, answering questions about the latest developments.
Different aspects of future work were discussed: timeline towards production release, automated testing, security audits and field testing, as well as different scenarios for the future FileSender strategic roadmap. The FileSender Board is currently reflecting on this discussion and will propose an updated strategic roadmap in fall 2023.
If you would like to get the new version of FileSender UI (together with the release 3.0) happen faster to serve the global R&E community, or you are interested in a specific feature, please contribute to its development financially or in-kind by contacting the FileSender Board. We’re in particular interested in sites willing to test early releases of version 3.0.
