Open email, time to upload. “The file exceeds the attachment capacity limit!”. Not just once, researcher Marilene Castro read a message similar to this one when she needed to send files, including videos and images, which were part of her master's thesis. The student at the University of Brasília (UnB) is studying social and environmental business models that can be replicated to employ people in conditions of social vulnerability. She says that especially at the beginning of her studies, transferring large files was a technological challenge she faced. 

“I had a lot of difficulty, because I couldn't send the files to my advisor. The difficulty was mutual, as she was also unable to advise me on the best way for me to send the files and she had difficulty receiving and storing the documents. I didn't know how to compress files and had to resort to drives. As I was unfamiliar with it, it took me a long time to learn. I keep thinking that it would be useful to have a service that would give people who don't have great technological knowledge the opportunity to send files without worrying about the configuration”, defends Marilene.

Marilene Castro, researcher and student at the University of Brasília (UnB)

It was thinking about the needs of people like Marilene Castro, students, professors and researchers from the user institutions that the FileSender was created. This service from the National Education and Research Network (RNP) makes it possible to send large files between multiple users, in a simple, agile and secure way. All this without the risk of exceeding the recipients' mailbox storage limit, since the file is made available for download. While documents are not downloaded, they are safely stored in a Brazilian datacenter. The sending is secure due to the identification of the sender of the files, who accesses the service via the Federated Academic Community (CAFe). Another benefit is that CAFe users can offer a voucher to third parties, which allows these people, not registered in the service, to share a file through FileSender. 

The news is that FileSender has evolved! Recently, a new version of the service was launched: more robust, modern and friendly. FileSender has a new interface, which simplifies the user's journey and also has increased capacity. Now you can send even larger files, upload more documents simultaneously and share them with more recipients at once. See what has changed:

Collaboration in the DNA

In 2020, the service grew by more than 400% compared to the previous year. With the sudden increase, the service experienced some instabilities and it was perceived that it was time to implement improvements. The Deputy Director of Services at RNP, Luiz Eduardo Coelho, says that the evolution made in the service was based on suggestions for improvement sent by the users themselves. “We have expanded the capacity and simplified its usability. In addition, we reinforce information security and compliance with the General Law for the Protection of Personal Data (LGPD). The service offers high security and reliability in the delivery of digital files, with a date and time stamp of who received it”.

But the service was born from a collaboration between other academic networks. The FileSender@RNP system was developed and is maintained by the Australian (AARNet), Irish (HEAnet), Dutch (SURFnet) and Norwegian (UNINETT) academic networks. RNP modeled, configured and customized the service in its own storage infrastructure, and, since 2014, it has directly benefited educational, research, health and cultural institutions across the country.

“FileSender@RNP is an open source program, developed by the international community with security and privacy over the academic network infrastructure. The service offers reliability and guarantees the sending of digital content to other researchers anywhere in the world. It is still accessible from any device and does not require any installation for its use”, details Luiz Coelho.

Luiz Coelho still reveals that the news should not stop there. In a strategic vision of the future, “FileSender@RNP is the first service of a future Catalog of Data Services that will have new services for the transmission and storage of data”, he says.

Go to filesender.rnp.br and check it out!