We listened to your feedback about making the User Manager more intuitive, especially as it relates to creating new users and groups. With Cerberus FTP Server 11.1, we’ve introduced a new user and group guided creation wizard to more easily create new Cerberus users and groups.
The new user wizard guides administrators through the minimum setup necessary to add a new user. Useful validation rules like ensuring the entered username is not currently in use, verifying that the password entered meets your configured minimum password requirements, and options to configure other basic settings all help to ensure you can quickly and easily add a new user account.
How the New User Wizard Works
There are 4 steps (3 of which are optional) to help set up a new user.
The Name and Password step of the New User Control
Minimum User Setup
The Name and Password step is the only one that is required. This step ensures you’ve selected a unique username, as well as a password that conforms to the system’s minimum password strength requirements. You won’t be able to proceed past this step until the username and password are validated.
The Profile step of the New User Control
Adding Basic User Information
The Profile step allows an administrator to enter basic user profile information.
One of the new features we think customers will enjoy is the ability to preview the group’s virtual directories as you change the Group selection for a user.
All of the fields on this step are optional.
The Folder Access step for the New User Control
Setting up Initial Folder Access
The Folder Access step allows an administrator to add a single new virtual directory to a user account. If you leave the Path and Name fields empty then no initial user virtual directory will be added. We also perform basic checking on the path and name to ensure they are valid virtual directory paths and names.
Once you’ve selected an initial folder for a user (optional), you can proceed to the Review page to preview your new user before creation:
The Review step of the New User Control
Reviewing your Changes
The Review page provides a summary of the new user you are about to create.
That’s it! Press the Create User button and your new user will be created in Cerberus and immediately selected for further editing in the User Manager.
Administrators can also skip the Profile, Folder Access, and Review pages during user creation. The only required fields are the username and a password on the first page. The Create User button is available from any step so that you can skip the optional information.
The new group wizard guides administrators through the minimum setup necessary to add a new group and works similarly to the new user wizard.
Other Improvements
In addition to our work on new user and group creation, we’ve also spent some time making some of our other controls easier to use. Our password control has received a makeover, complete with new features and a more consistent look and feel across the application.
Password control with new configurable minimum password length selection.
This is our first of several planned improvements to user management. We’re looking forward to getting these changes in our user’s hands, and we welcome any and all feedback that you would like to provide.
Check out the release notes for Cerberus FTP Server 11.1 for the details on all of the exciting changes and improvements we’ve made in this release.