Improved performance, better collaboration and easier migration: Nextcloud introduces Hub 26 Winter

With its newest release, Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter, the most popular privacy-first collaboration platform introduces a core rewrite to improve performance, expanded user migration and new collaboration features including cross-server federation.

„Since the beginning of Nextcloud ten years ago, our core principle has always been clear: organizations and individuals keep the ownership over their data instead of moving into a vendor-controlled ecysystem,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud. „And the increasing adoption proves us right. Millions of digital workplaces Nextcloud are rolled out every year. And we are picking up even more speed. With the latest release we further improve flexibility and usability for collaboration, communication and teamwork while ensuring privacy and control.“

Easier migration

The most concrete meaning of control over your data is the ability to choose where it is and be free from lock-in. Nexcloud Hub can be hosted anywhere and Hub 26 Winter expands the users’ freedom with a much improved migration application. Now installed by default, the application has expanded its export/import support to include Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Tables and data from the project management application Deck.

Now federated: Nextcloud Deck, Calendar, and Teams for chat and videoconferences

Federation allows users on different servers to communicate and share with each other, making decentralized collaboration possible. The most prominent example are e-mails, where users from Hotmail can email others on Gmail or corporate networks without issues. Compare this to the difficulty of sending of messages between closed platforms like Whatsapp, Snapchat, Discord or Slack.

Nextcloud is fundamentally decentralized but enables powerful collaboration even across servers thanks to federation. These features get extended with Hub 26 Winter for digital collaboration. Users can now share Nextcloud Deck boards for project planning with people from the outside to let them browse, add cards, or create stacks. With calendar federation, users can track events in shared calendars for cross-team planning. Even project teams can be created across users from different organizations to streamline their collaboration. As a result, organizations can collaborate without a need for merging systems or creating new accounts. Instead, they can use their existing Nextcloud identities and keep their data ownership.

Turbo-charged Nextcloud: new core for deployment on a large scale

Nextcloud announced a significant rewrite of its advanced file access layer, introducing the ADA engine. Written in PHP, Go and Rust, the new core was developed to address the unique challenge of bringing data to users rather than making them search for it across applications. The significant changes to the database and file system support this deeper level of integration, bringing a real improvement in user experience and productivity, especially for deployments on a large scale. ADA stands for Accelerated Direct Access but is also a homage to Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician and writer often considered the first computer programmer.

The focus was on reducing unnecessary load and latency in everyday interactions to speed up Photos, Nextcloud Talk, AI, clients, and more. The new architecture results in 40-90 percent less resources to generate previews in Photos, 20 percent faster fetching of sharing data for Nextcloud Talk and faster responses in local AI apps, saving up to 10 seconds per prompt and resulting in five to eight times faster local AI transcription. More information on the rewrite in a dedicated blog post.

Other new features of Hub 26 Winter include improvements for Nextcloud Files, Office, Whiteboard, Talk for chat and videoconferences, AI and Nextcloud Assistant, as well as mobile and desktop clients, among others. More information on the improvements in our launch blog: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub26-winter.

About Nextcloud
Nextcloud is the world’s most popular privacy-focused collaboration platform. It is used by tens of thousands of private and public organizations and tens of millions of private individuals to stay in control of their sensitive data and ensure privacy compliance.

With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold video conferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. The open source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. It runs on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.

Founded in 2016, Nextcloud is fully employee-owned and has grown organically ever since. Learn more at www.nextcloud.com.

Press contact
Nextcloud GmbH
Jos Poortvliet
Phone: +49 (0) 171 121 7528
pr@nextcloud.com