Pydio v8 vs Cells

Roadmap / Requests
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So, we are struggling with the decision to move to Cells. We have reviewed the information at https://pydio.com/en/features/pydio-8-vs-pydio-cells but it does not seem accurate/complete. The following are the sticking points.

That page indicates for WebDAV access, it is “WebDAV mount (Read only)” for Cells. The information at https://pydio.com/fr/docs/cells/v2/webdav-server-access seems to indicate that the WebDAV implementation in Cells is more complete. Can someone confirm whether WebDAV access is read only or complete?

We use Pydio v8 to give users access to SMB shares. Is this feature truly missing from Cells? Is it on a roadmap to restore this functionality?

The comparison page also seems to indicate AD/LDAP authentication has been moved to Enterprise only. I’m not sure the reasoning for this, but I notice other methods listed as “not supported”. Is it safe to assume that we could build our own auth mechanism?

To be honest, we’re struggling with Pydio right now. The decision to move from PHP to a PHP/Go hybrid, to drop features, and to move other features previously in the Community Edition to Enterprise is disturbing. There are definitely enough changes that Cells is a whole new product. This means we have to begin our entire evaluation cycle over again, and look at other alternatives out there.

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Hello Kyle,

We can understand your concerns, but first of all a bit of history

Ajaxplorer was released under AGPL license in 2008 as home project of Charles du Jeu who wanted to share music files with his band.

The project became popular and contributors added features and localisation as they needed.

At that time, Open source was more a give and take model.

We thought that sys admin will have personal use, and will introduce it in their work place.

It was a way to make a living out of our work (selling support).

SMB and LDAP were contributed and we were happy to include them in our open source version.

But Companies were not as philanthropic as we hoped, so we decided to make an Enterprise Edition of Pydio in 2014.

In 2017, we found there were limitations using PHP especially in handling big files. Also Pydio PHP
upgrades were not easy. So we decided to re write our software in Go.

As 95% of the code was made by our team, including LDAP/AD, we decided to do a Home version (with features for home use), and an Enterprise version.

And you are right it’s a completely new product, that is why we reshuffle the features.

In 2008, it was a good freeware, in 2020 we are making it a great Enterprise Product.

Concerning your questions about the features :

Webdav mount (read only) is an error

SMB shares is a missing feature. It won’t be on the roadmap for this year, and as I explained earlier, if someone wants to contribute it, we’ll include it in the Home version.

You could build your own auth mechanism, or you could contribute financially to help us.

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