Cerberus FTP Server version 11’s new interface unifies the web and desktop experience so that administrators now have a single, consistent way to administer their server – whether they are using a web browser, or our native Cerberus desktop application. You can learn more about these improvements to the FTP Server’s UI in our release notes, but we wanted to take a minute to discuss why we felt we needed to make them.
Why we made these changes
Change is always hard, and it’s almost impossible to satisfy everyone when undertaking a major interface redesign. The new UI in Cerberus FTP Server 11 is something we’ve been working towards for some time.
We didn’t decide on these changes lightly, but they were necessary to allow us to move forward with many of our planned changes and improvements. The legacy dialogs and interfaces are very inflexible in terms of our ability to make changes, and rely on technology that Microsoft stopped supporting long ago. It’s been holding back our ability to make UI improvements for some time.
The newer, web-based UI we’ve implemented is far more flexible, scalable, portable, and easy to improve upon. While it’s far from perfect in our first release, we can and will make changes and improvements quickly. We welcome any feedback you have as to what works well and where we can make improvements via our feedback form, and will make sure that your comments and suggestions get incorporated into future release planning.
Our team worked to make sure that we achieved feature parity with the legacy UI for our first release. However, we expect there will be legitimate instances where the legacy UI was considered superior for some use cases (the file manager is still a work-in-progress, for example). We will listen and work with customers to improve on those use cases as quickly as possible.
What does this mean for the future of the legacy UI?
The legacy interface is receiving no further development and will likely be removed completely at some point. We will put in warnings in an upcoming minor release to ensure administrators know that those dialogs are deprecated, and that we don’t recommend administrators use them. We’ve left them there to ease the transition to the newer UI.