Reorganized Report Views
Permissions Reporter 5 introduces a streamlined navigation structure that organizes reports into logical categories: Folder Permissions, File Permissions, Principals, File Owners, and Share Permissions. Each category now includes dedicated metrics dashboards that provide actionable security insights at a glance.
The new user interface features a refined light/dark mode toggle with an accent color chooser, giving you greater control over the visual presentation while maintaining the high-contrast readability you need for security analysis work.
Security Metrics Dashboards
One of the most significant additions in v5 is the introduction of security metrics dashboards for folders, files, principals, and shares. These dashboards transform raw permissions data into actionable intelligence, helping you identify security concerns and prioritize remediation efforts.
The Folder Security Metrics dashboard provides risk analysis highlighting inheritance breaks, over-exposed permissions, and privileged access grants. The File Security Metrics view reveals file age distributions and identifies permission hotspot directories. Principal Security Metrics analyzes account distribution, identifies disabled accounts in ACLs, and highlights orphaned SIDs. Share Security Metrics immediately surfaces critical concerns like Everyone access and Full Control grants.
Principals Report
The all-new Principals Report provides a centralized view of every security principal - users, groups, and computer accounts - discovered during your permissions scan. This powerful feature helps administrators understand who has access to file system resources, identify stale or disabled accounts, and analyze group membership structures.
Expand any principal to view detailed information including group members, group memberships, and per-principal statistics. Click the search button next to any statistic to instantly apply a post-scan filter that isolates those specific permission instances in the folder report.
SID History Tracking
For environments that have undergone Active Directory migrations, Permissions Reporter 5 introduces comprehensive SID History resolution and tracking. When enabled, historical SIDs are resolved and tracked at the principal level, and filters can now target accounts identified via their historical SIDs - essential for post-migration security audits.
File Permissions Enhancements
The File Permissions Report has been significantly enhanced with new detection capabilities and exclusion options. Configure overexposure analysis to identify files granting access to high-risk groups like Everyone or Authenticated Users, with configurable permission thresholds for each group.
New file exclusion controls allow you to filter out files based on attributes (system, hidden, temporary) or filename patterns, reducing noise and focusing your analysis on files that matter. The managed service account type is now supported with dedicated filtering options.
Export Improvements
Permissions Reporter 5 delivers substantial improvements to data export capabilities. XML data export files are now significantly smaller, HTML exports with collapsible trees load faster and scale better (without requiring JavaScript), and PDF exports are faster with improved layout and reduced memory usage.
Exports can now include full principal data and the new report metrics. The export configuration window has been redesigned for a more intuitive experience when selecting export options and formats.
Additional Improvements
- Windows Server 2025 is now supported.
- Folder permissions table report can now quickly toggle group member display on or off.
- File owner report now shows each owner's dominant file type and concentration percentage.
- New project option for expanding primary group membership.
- New path exclusion options for offline files, DFS, and virtual folders.
- New "excluded principals" tab in project settings for quick noise reduction.
- New global options for LDAP query timeouts and referral chasing.
- Comparison feature now reveals changes to folder counts, file counts, and more.
- Share permissions report now shows colorized permissions and folder owner.
- Inherited and non-inherited icons now have distinctive shapes for clarity.
- Post-scan filter account fields now have auto-complete populated by scan results.
- File owner treemap can now use file counts as its preferred visual metric.
- Scan metrics are now exported and restored for display upon import.
- Numerous performance improvements and memory usage optimizations.
- Bug fixes and other improvements...