Long release cycles are by no means unusual in the Open Source world. While some projects — Ubuntu, for example, and GNOME — have release cycles one can set their watch by, other projects take a less tightly scheduled approach — Debian's "we'll release when it's ready to release" philosophy comes to mind. Such would seem to be the case with the iFolder project, which released Version 3.7.2 on Friday — their first since 2007.

The iFolder project, for those unfamiliar, is an Open Source file synchronizing and sharing application sponsored by Novell, which utilizes it as the base for its own Novell iFolder offering, much the same way openSUSE serves as the framework for its SUSE Linux Enterprise releases. Unlike many file syncing/sharing systems, iFolder 3.7 supports Linux, Mac, and Windows, including both XP and Vista — Vista and OS X 10.6 support are new features for the 3.7 release.

Among the other new features in iFolder 3.7.2 are:

• SSL Communication Support SSL is now supported for communication between clients, the Web Admin and Web Access servers, and the enterprise servers.
• LDAPGroups LDAPGroup support is now available in iFolder, allowing group members to create, share, and own folders with other groups as well as individual users.
• Improved Web Admin Console Administrators can now utilize the master server's web console to perform maintenance on it as well as any slave servers, and are now able to place limits on user accounts and manage various levels of folder sharing.
• Folder Content Merging Users can now merge their local folders with the server folders. The server folder is transferred to the local machine — transforming the local folder into iFolder 3.7 format at the same time &mdsah; while anything "left over" is synced back to the server, minimizing traffic between the two.
• Support for OS X 10.6 and Windows Vista As previously mentioned, iFolder 3.7 adds support for Mac OS X 10.6 in addition to the existing support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5, as well as support for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista.
• Better Management of File Conflicts iFolder's graphical interface now allows users to view file details about both the server version and the local version, and decide which should be retained. Should a user wish to save both, a Conflict bin is provided.

The release notes for iFolder 3.7.2 identify OS X 10.4+, XP 32-bit, Vista 32-bit/64-bit, and openSUSE 10.3/SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop as supported client systems — we assume, most Linux systems with the basic requirements should be able to compile iFolder from source. Speaking of basic requirements, iFolder servers should be running Apache2 with SSL, Openldap, and XSP 1.2.6, clients should be using Firefox 2+, Safari 3.0, or Internet Explorer, and both should have Mono installed.

Interested parties can find out more about the 3.7.2 release in Novell's iFolder 3.7 White Paper [PDF], or in the iFolder 3.7.2 documentation. General information is available from the iFolder website, where users can also download iFolder for themselves.