35 representatives of 21 organizations (including 15 NRENs) from 18 countries participated in the FileSender Online Infoshare on February 29, 2024. Complementing the annual meeting at GÉANT’s TNC24 conference, this online gathering gave FileSender community enthusiasts – users and developers – the opportunity to not only be aware of new developments and future plans, but also to present their views, exchange experiences and share expectations.
FileSender aims to be a widely deployed service enabling anyone to easily and securely transfer files of any size from any person or machine to any other person or machine. FileSender explicitly targets mass usage and is built to service the 99% of users who would rather spend their time on other things than figuring out how to perform large file transfers.
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, state of finances and contributor contracts, current roadmap and state of development.
Guido Aben of SUNET, the Swedish NREN, and member of the FileSender Board, spoke about the Minimum Viable EOSC (MVE), aimed to provide functional support for Open Science in Europe, and the EOSC EU Node, which will include the minimum set of MVE components. One of them is the FileSender service – and this is a big win for the whole FileSender project! It means, that FileSender gets better exposure to (at least European) research users and research infrastructures. For more details you can read our previous article about FileSender new role in EOSC.
Isadora Araújo Gondim Rocha of RNP, the Brazilian NREN contributing the actual implementation of the new user interface (UI), showed a live demo of the new FileSender UI. She explained how, after extensive research and rigorous testing, the visualisation and presentation aspects of the FileSender UI were enhanced, thereby augmenting its usability and transforming it into a more user-friendly and intuitive interface. Responsive web design makes FileSender new UI look good on all user’s devices (smartphone, tablet, desktop), adapting to the different screen and window sizes.
The NRENs present with their logos in the banner at the bottom are the current Gold and Silver contributors to FileSender software development: AARNet (Australia), HEAnet (Ireland), RNP (Brazil), SURF (the Netherlands), and Switch (Switzerland).
During the Q&A session, representatives from RNP, Sérgio Leal Fonseca and Wander Rocha Gomes, answered questions from the audience about potential bugs (if any to be corrected), the possibility of replacing the type of visual elements or changing the CSS buttons color, and the option of generating an API key. The question about the use of FileSender (including the invitation flow) without involving email triggered additional discussion – and will be explored further.
Ben Martin, the Lead Developer for FileSender, described the latest issues found and tasks completed on the way toward making the new UI available in a release.
The new FileSender UI is integrated with the main code and ready for testing. Version 3.0.beta6 of the FileSender software was released on February 24, 2024, and is available on: https://github.com/filesender/filesender/releases/. We encourage FileSender administrators to investigate the new UI and provide feedback on existing issues and/or lodge new issues on the GitHub Issue Tracker.
If you would like to expedite the launch of the new version of FileSender UI (along with the release 3.0) to benefit the global R&E community, or if you are interested in a specific feature, please contribute to its development financially or in-kind by contacting the FileSender Board. We are especially interested in sites willing to test early releases of version 3.0, but all contributions are always warmly welcomed.
New FileSender User Interface
