HELIOS News 03 March, 2004

HELIOS EtherShare AFP 3.1 support with "smart permissions" now available

Hannover, Germany – March 3, 2004 -- HELIOS Software GmbH, a leading provider of file, print and prepress server solutions for Mac OS X, Linux and all major UNIX platforms, announces that HELIOS EtherShare support for AFP 3.1 is now available with the significant, HELIOS exclusive, "smart permissions" feature. HELIOS EtherShare with AFP 3.1 support is the easiest, best performing, and most reliable method for sharing files easily and efficiently over a network with multiple Mac OS X clients.

Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) 3.1 is required to provide full server compatibility with Mac OS X clients, and works as well with Mac OS 8/9 clients. EtherShare support for AFP 3.1 brings these major benefits to OS X clients:

• Very large file support, no 4 GB limit any longer, for archive, prepress and video data
• Unicode/UTF-8 file names and volumes
• File names up to 255 characters in length
• Client/Server reconnect support, and client sleep support
• Full Mac OS X compatibility (Mac OS X 10.3 recommended)
• Mac OS 8/9 backward compatibility via existing AFP 2.2 protocol
• 2-3 times faster performance than NFS or SMB/CIFS file sharing
• Smart file/folder permissions for OS X clients

HELIOS exclusive "smart permissions"

A unique HELIOS feature is smart file/folder permissions for OS X clients. This adds tremendous functionality to AFP 3.1, and solves one of the biggest problems for Mac OS X clients - that other users cannot change new files and folders unless “write permissions” are manually granted after every save. HELIOS "smart permissions" addresses this problem and creates files/folders by default with write permissions. The HELIOS AFP 3.1 server assigns write permissions for "group" and "others" to folders, and assigns to files the write permissions of the parent folder. This solves a serious issue for many users and makes OS X file sharing and collaboration much easier.

2-3 times faster performance than NFS or SMB/CIFS file sharing

Using a 1 GHz G4 Mac OS X 10.2 client connected via Gigabit Ethernet to a fast EtherShare AFP 3.1 server, LanTest™ shows read/write performance up to 60 MBytes per second when using a single OS X client. Server-based FindFile using AFP volumes is done in seconds versus hours using NFS or SMB/CIFS volumes.

100% AFP file and directory ID compatibility

In addition, HELIOS EtherShare offers 100% AFP compatible file and directory IDs, which are used by Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X clients to reference files and folders. Other AFP server solutions without 100% AFP ID support suffer from major multi-user problems such as removing or using wrong files/folders, especially when using multiple Mac OS X clients. Working with HELIOS EtherShare avoids this problem.

Complete information, release notes and downloads are available at:
http://www.helios.de/support/afp31p.phtml.

HELIOS EtherShare is part of the HELIOS 4th generation family of network and prepress server products. EtherShare, PCShare, and WebShare provide integrated cross-platform networking for Macintosh and Windows clients, offering advanced file and print server services, with easy remote server administration. HELIOS ImageServer, PDF HandShake and PrintPreview bring high efficiency and advanced capabilities to design, prepress and printing operations.

Smart Ideas for Better Networking
HELIOS products run on powerful and scalable servers including Apple Computer Mac OS X, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX and Tru64 UNIX, IBM AIX, SGI IRIX, Sun Solaris, and Linux on Pentium based systems. HELIOS products provide reliable cross-platform support for Macintosh, DOS/Windows and UNIX-based clients.

Distributors sell HELIOS products worldwide to value-added resellers who provide complete networking solutions to customers. HELIOS also works with many strategic partners that incorporate HELIOS server software to provide powerful third party archive, asset management and workflow solutions. HELIOS software products are also available as part of OEM solutions by many major vendors in the prepress industry.

For U.S. Sales:
European MikroGraf Corp.: 916-923-3520; E-mail: sales (at) ugraf.com; www.ugraf.com

Editorial contact:

Germany
Helmut Tschemernjak, HELIOS Software GmbH, Steinriede 3, D-30827 Garbsen, Germany; Tel +49-5131-709320 Fax +49 5131-709325;
E-mail: mktg (at) helios.de; Internet: www.helios.com

U.S.A.
Thomas Hallinan, HELIOS Software GmbH, 209-827-2760, mktg (at) helios.de
Bill Gram-Reefer, WORLDVIEW, 925-215-8463, reefer (at) worldviewpr.com