Sitefinity Desktop Application / Possible Improvements

On the launch of a new site, I had the opportunity to use the new Desktop Application for Sitefinity and love it.  We started with our Libraries in the database and moved them to a file store.  However, I feel there are a few minor things that could be improved.

Upload file size seems to be limited to 25Meg, even though the site I am connected to has been configured to 200Meg.  It would be nice if it could adjust to the site it is connected to or allow an option to increase beyond the 25Meg limit.  Notification of the reason for failure if the file is large than allowed would be good ... I figured it out by trial and error.

Uploading files is simple, but I had an concern when uploading a large number of files.  The icon for uploading (gear) and upload success (check) are both green, which made it a bit more difficult to identify files that were still transferring.

Also when Uploading files, there seemed to be a large number (to me) of failed uploads (it seemed to be about 1 in 20).  Would it be possible for the system to retry the upload a number of times (possible set by the user)?

Uploading Libraries and included files was another area that became a challenge because there was no notification of the number of files being uploaded in the sub-Library and if any of those failed.  If I navigated to the Library after completion, no failures were shown or identified in any way.  Some reporting or logging should be available to correct for this.

Transferred files where the file already exists with the same name simply placed a -1, -2, etc. after the file name.  There should be some option to overwrite the existing file.

Searching Files in a Library would be much easier if there was some documentation on its use.  The best I could determine, I could enter the first part of a name and find all like names.  I could not determine if any wildcard options are available without the documentation.

When Opening Uploaded Files, some of them simply displayed a white screen (most often with PDFs).  When I went to open the file later, it seemed to work OK.  If I come across any particular files that do this consistently, I will attach a version to this page.

Thanks,
Bob Fornal

Seems like a good list for Telerik to consider! I want to suggest to add multi-lingual support to the wish list. I can't use the app at all because of that, but it indeed looks great at first glance.

Hi,

Thank you for the suggestions of possible improvements and implementations. I have forward them to our Sitefinity Desktop Application's team.

Regards,
Stefani Tacheva
Telerik

Hello,

Thank you for your interest in Sitefinity Desktop Application and the provided feedback, we really appreciate it. We will go through the points you have mentioned:

• Multilingual support – This feature is already part of our Roadmap. Expectations are that we will deliver it with Sitefinity 6.3.
• File size upload restrictions – This feature is also planned for implementation and will most probably be delivered no later than Sitefinity 6.3.
• Media items upload status icons – We are currently working on many UI improvements including cleaner status notifications.
• Uploading media items failure – Failed upload means that there is something wrong with the media item itself, its size or other internal problem. Most probably retrying the operation could result in additional issues. In this context, we are aware of the need of additional notifications about the status of the operations – number of items uploaded, failed, etc. All application failures are already logged and can be found in ~\AppData\Roaming\Telerik\SitefinityDA
• Overwriting existing files – Although this is a common behavior for local files management, media items in Sitefinity may contain a lot of additional information. To prevent possible data loss, we do not directly overwrite existing files. However, we are currently working on Replace file functionality for a single media item which will be available with our next release and Sitefinity 6.2.
• Searching files in a library – We will take your recommendation into consideration and find a way to provide more explicit information on this feature’s usage.
• Opening files issue – This might be an issue with our current implementation and we will investigate it further. In the meantime, if you come across again with this case, we will highly appreciate if you send the file to us.

Please, do not hesitate to contact us for any additional feedback.

Thanks, I'm looking forward to using it from 6.3 onwards.