Hello,
Sorry for dropping in the conversation a little bit late (hope you won’t consider this necrobumping 
), but I only started using Pydio Cells this week, though I’ve been using Pydio since it was still called “Ajaxplorer” about 10 years ago (damn, are we getting old or what? 
).
First I’d like to congratulate the Pydio team for bringing the community such a wonderful tool and continuing to bring innovations such as those available in “cells”, thank you!
Although I can very well understand that the Pydio developers need to push the paid “Enterprise Edition”, I am quite surprised to discover that the granular access control of “Read/Write/Deny” permissions on workspaces’ sub-directories is not available in the “Home Edition”. As, IMHO, it is one of the most basic requirement one can expect from a file-sharing system such as Pydio.
For instance, a family using Pydio Cells “Home Edition” would more than likely have only one main datasource containing a few sub-directories that would get different accesses. Be it as simple as one accessible by the adults and another accessible by the children…
Now, as @zayn stated, it would be possible to achieve this by splitting a root datasource’s subfolders into many datasources but then it appears to be so cumbersome…
One could probably also achieve something close to setting ACLs on sub-directories by creating individual cells, but then again, it appears to me that this is not the intended use of cells.
I might be wrong of course and, as I said, I’m only starting to explore “Cells”.
So I’d like to ask if it would be conceivable to have, for example, the possibility to control ACLs maybe only up to one sublevel in the Home Edition?
As this would avoid the unnecessary management complexity of having numerous datasources, while still limiting the possibilities that might be required in an “Enterprise” deployment scenario.
Asking this brings me to another question: is there a place devoted to Pydio Cells “feature requests”? As this is typically something that would find its place there.
Finally, can I draw the Pydio team’s attention to the fact that, although most limitations seems to be well specified in the documentation, this particular one is not indicated. To the contrary, on the Roles and Inheritance page of the documentation, the Access Control Lists paragraph is stating:
… In the various users/roles/groups editors, one can grant permissions on Workspaces or on workspaces subfolders in two ways: statically using simple Read/Write values, or dynamically using Security Policies (Enterprise Edition).
And further down, under Static Accesses:
… When editing ACLs, we recommend sticking to the Workspace level of granularity, to make your security model more maintainable. In some cases, you may require to directly assign rights at a folder level. For that you can use the “+” button next to the workspace name to list the workspace children and assign rights accordingly.
Which clearly let the reader think that this feature is available in the Home Edition of Pydio Cells!.. As one, like the OP and myself, would probably expect
The last point I’d like to make regarding the documentation, and more broadly about the available information about Pydio Cells, is that I was unable to find information regarding the effective pricing of the “Enterprise Edition”, except for contacting the Pydio’s sales team. This, IMHO once again, does not motivate potential “deployers” to consider using Pydio Cells ED when planning solutions for their clients.
Being an IT consultant, I regularly have to quickly elaborate potential solutions for my clients’ requests and give them a rough cost estimate. In my situation, having to contact a sales rep before I can even roughly evaluate a solution’s cost is most of the time a show stopper that will drive me to look at other options for which I can get an immediate idea of the involved costs.
Let me finish by thanking once again the Pydio’s team for all the fine work they are doing, I sincerely hope that the few remarks I made here above might be taken into consideration and will possibly help in some way.
Best to you all.