What’s New

We’ve added four major new account management and reporting features in Cerberus FTP Server 12.2:

1. Showing group membership from Active Directory (AD) group to Cerberus group mappings for AD users
2. Native Cerberus users now have secondary groups to allow a user to be in multiple groups
3. A new “inherited from” column showing what groups or combination of groups a virtual directory originated from
4. Automatic merging of multiple, identical virtual directories on an account into a single listing with cumulative permissions from the merged directories

Secondary Groups

We’ve formalized a new type of group membership in Cerberus FTP Server called a secondary group member.  

Previously, users could only be a member of one group.  That membership would impart both the settings from the group, as well as the group’s virtual directories, onto a user.

A secondary group membership imparts only the virtual directories from a group to the user that is a member.  No other settings from the secondary group are applied to the user.  This is the same way that AD group to Cerberus group mappings have always worked for AD users.  We’re now calling those types of group memberships secondary groups, and we’ve provided a way for native Cerberus users to have those memberships as well.

Showing Secondary Group Membership for AD Users with AD Group to Cerberus Group Mappings

For AD users, we now show the secondary groups the user is a member of on the AD User’s Profile page:

These secondary, virtual directory only groups are added to an AD user when a mapping exists between an AD group the user is a member of, and a Cerberus group.  In the example above the user has 4 different Cerberus groups that the AD user is a member of because of these mappings.  The AD user will get the virtual directories from each of these Cerberus groups added to its own virtual directory list.  We now show on the AD user’s Profile tab both the Cerberus group and the AD group mapping that resulted in the Cerberus group membership.

Multiple Group Membership for Native Cerberus Users

For native Cerberus users, adding secondary directories is a bit more straightforward.  You can simply select a group from the drop down list on the Secondary Groups field and the group will be added to the user as a virtual directory only secondary group.  There is no limit to the number of secondary groups a user can be a member of.

Virtual Directory Group Context

The new “inherited from” column shows the origin of each virtual directory.  In the case where multiple groups have a virtual directory with identical names and paths, the virtual directories are combined into a single entry with the cumulative permissions from each group. You will see multiple group entries in the “Inherited from” column for a virtual directory when this merging has occurred.

By default, we don’t show the “Inherited from” column for virtual directories, but you can easily toggle the display of that column on or off, including all other columns, using the new “Columns” button on the toolbar directly above the listing.

New AD and LDAP User Reporting Options

You can now create account reports for AD and LDAP authentication sources in the same way you can for native users.  When the Account Report type is selected in the Report Manager, the administrator is presented with a list of authentication sources for reporting.  You can generate different reports for one or more sources at a time.

An example AD user account report for a specific domain configuration:

In addition to the new report types, we now show what secondary groups a native or AD user is a member of, including group mapping context information for AD users.  These new Account reports allow sorting on fields, as well as searching within larger reports for specific user details.  

You can also see inheritance information for each user’s virtual directory so that you can easily determine if the virtual directory came from one or more groups.

There’s a lot of information in the Folder Access column for each user, so to make the tables a little less overwhelming, we only show the virtual directory count for each user when the report is first generated.  However, you can easily toggle displaying full virtual directory information for a user by clicking the Virtual Directories button in the Folder Access column.  If you prefer to immediately see full virtual directory information for all users then we’ve also provided “Expand” and “Collapse” buttons on the report toolbar to immediately expand or hide detailed information for all users in a report table.

There are also new buttons to show or hide report columns, as well as a new print button for report printing.

Availability

These exciting new features are available now in Cerberus FTP Server version 12.2 and beyond.  Improvements specific to Active Directory are applicable to the Professional edition and higher, while reporting enhancements are available in our Enterprise edition.  We look forward to hearing how our customers use these features and how any additional improvements would help you with your file sharing needs.  As always, we would love to hear your feedback.