Resilient communication and collaboration with the new Nextcloud Talk

When the world pivots, keep your communication steady

Have we lost control over our communication?

The Big Tech clouds keep the entire world’s data in a choke hold, squeezing to increase profit and enabled by proprietary technology. All while nurturing the myth that there’s no alternative. In uncertain times like today, we should not give anybody that much power. It’s no longer optional to keep the tools we depend on the most in our own hands.

Governments and businesses are wondering: how can we make communication resilient to political shifts, price hikes, compliance challenges, and Big Tech monopolies dominating the software market? Three main concerns need to be answered.

Are you free from vendor lock-in?

If Microsoft decides to hike up its prices by tomorrow, it won’t lose its business. When all your data is trapped inside one cloud and made incompatible, switching is increasingly difficult and expensive. And it is so by design.

Is your privacy still in check?

Changes in the US administration may have a direct impact on technology policies and transatlantic privacy laws. With frameworks like the EU-US Data Privacy Framework being practically defunct, organizations in Europe and beyond face renewed uncertainty over whether their communications and personal data remain compliant or even protected. Digitally sovereign communication isn’t just a preference anymore, but is quickly becoming a legal and strategic necessity.

Is your infrastructure really under your control?

Shutting down access to the Big Tech clouds could cause major disruptions in any of the world’s economies. The existence of this opportunity is itself a threat.

With no other tool providing the convenience of all communication integrated in one suite — team chat, video calls, webinars, and training features — tools like Microsoft Teams have secured dominance on the market. But we can’t keep relying on solutions that take away our control.

Presenting Nextcloud Talk “Munich”

Organizations and users need a more reliable, privacy-first collaboration platform, now more than ever. The numbers speak for themselves: the demand for Nextcloud Talk has tripled in the past quarter, compared to the same period last year. Seeing this spike, we asked our users: what needs does Nextcloud Talk satisfy to warrant their choice?

The answers are: resilience, productivity features, and ease of use that provides a low barrier for migration. So, that is where we put our efforts for this release!

Today, we are presenting Nextcloud Talk “Munich”, the innovative, future-proof answer to Microsoft Teams that provides all the tools that a modern hybrid team needs, making them easy to use and integrate into any organization’s workflows.

We enable new telephony features with Nextcloud Talk Phone and introduce a dashboard to speed up your navigation, while your privacy is protected with Secure View support and Sensitive conversations. Navigating your conversations becomes easier with Meeting conversations and other user interface improvments. With new usability and integration features, we made Nextcloud Talk even easier for new users.

With Nextcloud Talk ‘Munich’, get ready for a new generation of online communication — where you’re in control.

You realize the vital nature of those tools when you face downtime or have to move and adapt your entire team to a new collaboration space. Just think of stress factors, like security breaches, performance load, and compliance challenges, that can affect your organization’s flow of information.

With Nextcloud Talk “Munich”, we help you stay in control at all times, ensuring a resilient and independent collaboration space.

• Host your tools where you want, be it on your own infrastructure or with a cloud provider you trust
• Enjoy a fully fully open source environment, with access to the entire code, full transparency on how your data is processed, and freedom to make any custom adjustments.
• Enjoy decentralized communication between servers with federation (just like how email works!)
• Run an air-gapped Nextcloud Talk for your most a sensitive, compliance-focused use cases
• Encrypt your data and calls at all times

And we added even more tools to enhance your privacy: Secure View and Sensitive conversations.

In control of what you share: Secure View

With Secure View, you can share documents in Nextcloud for viewing with download restriction and a watermark to prevent unauthorized copying. Now you can enable it for all external shares in Nextcloud Talk, so all the external participants in your public conversations view shared documents with privacy restrictions.

Sensitive conversations stay private on your screen

Do you need to share your screen without sharing any private communication from your chats? Or are you working in an open, public space, and you need to double down on your privacy settings? Nextcloud Talk now lets you keep your sensitive chats even more private. You can easily hide the last message from your chat list and conceal messengers or message content in notifications.

Nextcloud Talk covers the key ways hybrid teams communicate, such as quick team chats, meetings with clients and partners, webinars, and training sessions, in one integrated platform.

• Team chat: Collaborate every day across private and group conversations, share files in a snap, link documents and media, run polls, send voice messages, integrate bots and external services. With interactive widgets, collaborate on the documents in your chats, browse calendars and kanban boards from Nextcloud Deck, and more.
• Video meetings: Run quick voice and video calls with your team and external partners. Keep your calls healthy with mindfulness features, moderate crowded meetings for hundreds of people, set privacy settings. In the calls, share your screen, use team chat, send reactions, and more. 
• Webinars and training: Nextcloud Talk is a perfect virtual classroom tool that supports interactive sessions with whiteboards, presenting features, role-based moderation, lobby, custom invitations, breakout rooms and polls.

All conversation details in the redesigned sidebar

Now you know a bit more about the people you work with. In private conversations, along with shared files, tasks, chats, and other items, we added info about your coworkers: their role, location, and local time. You can also zoom in on their photo to see a full image instead of the thumbnail.

Expand private calls into group meetings

Sometimes you wish to include more people in the call you are already having with someone in a private conversation. And now you can add more people to your one-on-one calls: Nextcloud Talk will simply create a new conversation with the participants and move you there. Even while the call is in progress.

Virtual telephony with Nextcloud Talk Phone

We present Nextcloud Talk Phone, a feature that makes your entire business communication truly unified in one place by integrating telephony for each user. Currently, you can let users connect to your group calls via phone or call them from a conversation to invite them to a meeting. For this release, we level this feature up!

With Nextcloud Talk Phone, the administrator can give unique extensions or phone numbers to each user on the server, so when they receive a call, they can pick up easily in Nextcloud Talk. And when they are out-of-office, the call will be automatically redirected to their replacement!

This requires a SIP service – Nextcloud supports a range of options. Contact us to help you pick!

Migration made easy

Migrating to new software can be a major pain for organizations, especially at scale. So we made Nextcloud Talk “Munich” easy to adapt to, making sure you and your team can continue to do all your work when you migrate to Nextcloud Talk. There’s no reason to keep using unreliable cloud solutions!

What’s more, the open source nature of Nextcloud Talk, its API, and its flexible architecture allow organizations to fully customize their communication platform. That’s why getting started with Nextcloud Talk is now easier than ever.

Want a closer look at the migration process? Visit Nextcloud migration guide

Fully customizable to your needs

User-side: themes, notifications, and more

Adjust the UI themes, configure notifications, and manage your input and output devices for calls. Customize chats, pin conversations, and manage in-chat permissions.

Admin: users, permissions, privacy

Manage users and roles, moderate conversations, configure privacy features, set recording consent rules, and more.

Advanced: API, integration, automation

Advanced customization options are limitless through Nextcloud Talk API to enable custom integrations and bots, and automate processes via Nextcloud Flow.

New tools for built-in comfort

And once your Nextcloud Talk is up and running, you’ll enjoy effortless collaboration thanks to its customizable setup. Organize your conversations, enable emergency notifications (even while away), and view all of your communication at a glance in your dashboard.

Ease in with Nextcloud Talk Dashboard

We improved the way you start off your day with Nextcloud Talk, adding a dashboard with a summary of the most important things. It shows you today’s meetings with an overview of the details, chats where you have been mentioned, and lets you configure your devices. You can also quickly create or join conversations, join an active meeting, or start one.

Create temporary conversations for meetings

You can run a meeting in any existing conversation or create a dedicated meeting room when planning it in your calendar. To help you keep your space clean from conversations you will only use once, we separate “Meeting conversations”, created for a single appointment, from the other conversations. Nextcloud Talk “Munich” lets you decide whether you want to keep, archive, or delete the room once the meeting is over. It also stays hidden before the event to avoid clutter and confusion.

Get notified of important messages only

Even while away on a vacation or in focus mode, you may want to stay tuned for important messages in case of an emergency. Now you can mark conversations as “important” to receive notifications in “do-not-disturb” mode.

Webinar on Nextcloud Talk vs Microsoft Teams: The more private choice

Join us on June 18th to discover how Nextcloud Talk “Munich” offers a more secure, feature-rich, and fully controllable alternative to Microsoft Teams, with live demos and in-depth comparisons.

Reserve your spot

Desktop client: branding, system-level status, and badges

What’s new in the Nextcloud Talk desktop client:

• Branding features. Just like the cloud version, now you can configure the branding of your desktop Nextcloud Talk client. You can already enforce the server URL to be set when people log in, as well as replace logos and icons with your own branding.
• System-level status. Now your status adjusts automatically based on whether you are actively using your computer, even when you are not currently in the app. For example, it will show you online as you are working, and switch to “Away” should you lock your screen, even if you didn’t chat in the Talk app!
• Notification badge. Nextcloud Talk icon in the task bar or Dock and system tray or menu bar (depending on the OS) now displays a counter of notifications from chats.

Mobile apps: iOS Shortcuts and easy media sharing

With the Nextcloud Talk mobile app, you can easily share media like photos and videos in your chats. We improved the sharing interface, adding suggestions of the latest photos for quick sharing.

Using the iOS Shortcuts app, you can automate actions in Nextcloud Talk and use it together with Siri. For example, ask Siri to quickly open an account you want, set status details, or perform something more complex like send a custom message* to a predefined chat. You can also create a Home Screen button for such actions, for example, to open Nextcloud Talk with a personal or work account.

*Tip: use “Ask for Input” action in Shortcuts for custom messages and other similar commands.

You can also configure actions based on your location, time, and other conditions. For example, set a custom status “Working from the office” once you connect to your office WiFi. There’s a lot to play around with — experiment and share your automations with us!

Let’s Talk

Nextcloud Talk is a resilient platform for modern hybrid collaboration. It is the only decentralized, privacy-friendly solution today that can compete with the dominance of Microsoft Teams. And in uncertain times like now, the stakes are too high to put all our data in the control of Big Tech.

It is designed to let you work as you expect to, providing all the essential tools for team chat, meetings, webinars, and training sessions in a clean and easy-to-navigate interface. Accessible from anywhere and anytime from the web, desktop, and mobile.

With a familiar, logical design and extensive freedom of customization, getting started with Nextcloud Talk is easy. Give our latest platform a try and see for yourself!

Get the new Nextcloud Talk

Download the latest version of Nextcloud Talk here or start your instant trial right away!

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