While a press release is obviously meant to be public, which is why the simple password was chosen, you might wonder why the ministry didn’t just use a completely password-less link for their Nextcloud share?

Secure sharing with Nextcloud

Nextcloud differentiates itself from public clouds like Microsoft 365, Dropbox or Google Drive with a focus on privacy and data sovereignty. Unlike public clouds, Nextcloud often runs on private cloud environments, giving the organization deploying it direct control over the data. It wouldn’t make sense for the German government (or any other) to hand over important data to foreign tech firms, which is why Nextcloud is widely deployed in the European public sector.

Protect your public links with passwords

With Nextcloud, users can share directly with other users. This makes sure no data leaves the government data center. But sometimes data must be shared outside the organization, either to a single individual or fully in public like with a press release.

Nextcloud allows users to create one, or more, public links for this purpose. A public link lets a third party who has the link view and (depending on the settings) download and edit the file. As you might share a document for editing with one person, and create another link with only viewing permissions to a second, each link can have its own protections. Including a password, expiration date and more!

The system administrator can put in additional controls, to ensure data is always protected. The File Access Control can use rules to stop files from being accessed outside Germany, for example. Or a mandatory 30 day expiration date can make sure links get cleaned up after a while. And last, but very relevant, administrators can enforce a password on each public link.

This setting is clearly enabled on the Nextcloud server used by the German Ministry of Defense, and explains why a simple password (1234) had to be chosen. Note that administrators can even enforce a certain degree of password quality, blocking such simple passwords from being chosen by users!

In other words. Mr. Pistorius does not use the password ‘1234’ to protect any data – it was meant to make it easy to access the press release.

We hope the readers at Bild appreciate out explanation!

For a more detailed exploration of our file sharing features available throughout Nextcloud, see our in-depth docs on File Sharing or our Sharing features overview.

The post Educating Bild: password-protected sharing appeared first on Nextcloud.

You ask yourself, what features do I need?

Can it scale up and still be reliable for my whole company?

In today’s world, we demand only the highest caliber online communication tools to meet our needs.

They need to bring you to the next level and break barriers.

That’s why in this blog, you’ll discover why individuals and businesses alike are turning to Nextcloud Talk for its unmatched features, security and seamless collaboration.

A collaborative video conferencing tool

Nextcloud Talk is an open-source video conferencing and chat application. Designed to keep all your online conversations private, whether by video or chat, all data is kept on your own servers and no data – not even metadata – can be leaked.

The features you need for your meetings:

Video conferencing in Nextcloud offers essential and purposeful features to make video calls optimal.

Screen sharing with profile view

Let others in the call see you while you share your screen to foster a more personal encounter.

Easy recording

Record your video conferences for record keeping or later use. Before anyone joins the call, a popup to consent for recording is delivered to ensure full transparency to participants. Download and save your recording in your Nextcloud.

Support for large group conferencing

Lots of participants? No problem. Large groups are well-managed and you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Reactions in calls

Express your feelings in a call to acknowledge someone’s statement, but not go as far as disrupting.

Track call duration and speaker talking times

After one hour, you’ll get a notification that you’ve hit the hour mark so you can stay aware of your time and others’. You’ll also never have to guess how long you’ve been talking, as speaker talking times will be tracked and noted at the end of the call.

Available on web and mobile devices

Take video conferencing from your office, home or on mobile with iOS and Android like never before.

Why it works: Integrated with your Nextcloud

Nextcloud is unique in the sense that everything is connected. You can explore incredible integration capabilities with the rest of your Content Collaboration Platform.

Not sure what that entails?

Nextcloud operates as a one-stop-shop platform integrating its own file storage, email, chat/video platforms and more so you can work efficiently and flexibly.

For example, if you’re in the middle of a call in Nextcloud Talk with a colleague and want to share a proposal your team has been working on, you can open the document directly from the chat sidebar. This is due to Files and Talk being integrated which saves you a lot of time and effort.

The astonishing advantages of Nextcloud operating as a single platform doesn’t stop here – enable hundreds, even thousands, of integration possibilities across all apps with Nextcloud as a Single Platform.

High Performance Backend

Take it a step further with Nextcloud Talk’s High Performance Backend (HPB).

Designed for larger organizations, Nextcloud Talk’s High Performance Backend offers the capacity, reliability and features enterprises need to conduct their business privately, securely and efficiently.

Unbeatable convenience

• Dial-in by a phone line to join a call with SIP bridge
• Conduct large scale webinars, public broadcasting or video conferencing with lobby

As a HPB customer, you will notice improved connection speed and network efficiency after the implementation due to lowering the load from calls on the Nextcloud server.

Why open-source video conferencing

With open-source technology, you have the opportunity to have full reign over your data. Whether you self-host on your own server or use a trusted hosting provider, your communications data happens and remains on your server, unlike popular alternatives like Microsoft Teams or Slack.

This unique protection extends further with our encrypted technologies by even keeping metadata at bay.

The post Nextcloud Talk: Open-source online video conferencing software appeared first on Nextcloud.

Thank you for choosing Nextcloud. We look forward to serving you next year, wishing you all the best and hoping that it brings you joy, success, and endless possibilities with Nextcloud by your side. Our annual Wrap-Up is packed with exciting updates, insights, and behind-the-scenes stories that showcase the dedication and hard work of our team and community in 2023. Beep… boop… beep.

Nextcloud Assistant

Incredible company growth

Nextcloud GmbH is set to exceed its growth goals this year with already over 60% higher bookings compared to 2022, adding hundreds of new Enterprise customers and partners. We are very proud to continue our growing streak, achieved in an organic, sustainable way, without relying on external investors. We are deeply grateful for the trust you’ve shown us and we will continue to prove you made the right decision!

To accommodate our growth had to change offices, and in both Berlin and Stuttgart, we now have new, bigger and more centrally located offices. In Berlin, you can find us pretty much next to the Friedrichstrasse station in the heart of the city. In Stuttgart we moved less far, only a few blocks from where we used to be at Rotebühlplatz. Of course, most team members continue to work from home from all over the world!

We are now over 100 team members spanning 20 countries, all working remotely or in our offices in Berlin and Stuttgart. With a third of them joining us in 2023, we witnessed an impressive team growth!

Notably, eight team members are working students who joined Nextcloud to start their career early in the software industry, gaining valuable experience and knowledge alongside their studies.

Welcoming talent from all walks of life, Nextcloud is dedicated to seeking bright minds all across the globe. This year, team members from seven new locations joined us: Cameroon, Finland, Georgia, Hungary, India, Taiwan and Wales (UK).

A thriving community

Of course we are more than a company! Nextcloud’s success would not be possible without a healthy, thriving community of contributors behind Nextcloud. In 2023, we have seen many lines of code weaving the world’s leading open-source collaboration platform.

Technology

All these amazing people worked together and made tons of changes to Nextcloud itself, bringing our users not 1, not 2, not 3 but FOUR releases!

Growing pace with Hub launching 4x

Hub 4

Hub 4 brings ethical AI to Nextcloud, introducing content generation features backed by pioneering open source AI models. Smart Picker arrives in multiple core apps, offering easy sharing of multiple items like files, cards, tables, locations, Collectives, and much more. It is also the first time the Tables app appears in Hub, along with Notes as a core app.

Hub 5

Hub 5 earns Nextcloud Hub the title of the 1^st self-hosted AI-powered workspace with numerous features and AI models joining the stack. The ecosystem evolves: Tables receives elaborate formatting tools, chatting and conferencing in Talk is much more intuitive, and new integrations like Notion, Outlook and Teams become available.

Hub 6

With Hub 6, the whole platform advances towards a smarter collaboration suite. Nextcloud Assistant arrives in Hub, introducing a sleek AI interface and diverse in-app text processing tools. Multiple improvements in Talk, Dashboard, Groupware and other apps provide better focus and a healthier online working culture.

Hub 7

Finally, with our latest release, we make Hub even more interconnected and synergetic. Cross-app features like Unified Search and out-of-office message highlight this version’s focus on integrity, while user-focused platform-wide improvements and ongoing investment in AI augmentation further elevate Hub experience.

Pioneering ethical AI

This year, Nextcloud has been committed to introducing and advancing AI capabilities in Hub, embracing transparency, choice and fair technologies. Ethical AI has become a highlight of 2023, with our efforts to help our users make informed decisions while having access to the best-in-class solutions. With dozens of AI integrations available in Nextcloud to this day, there are options matching everyone’s needs: remote or local, established or emerging, universal or leading in their niche.

Welcome Nextcloud Assistant

Nextcloud Assistant is a 100% open-source AI assistant that doesn’t prey on your data! It offers a friendly, native interface to an AI model of your choice, hosted locally or remotely. Use it in Mail to summarize threads, in Text to analyze and generate content, in Talk to augment your conversation, or anywhere in Hub via the toolbar to perform quick text related tasks.

Ethical AI Rating

With numerous AI models and services available in Nextcloud, we want you to to be aware of the risks you take. Our Ethical AI Rating, labeling apps based on code transparency, deployment model, and availability of training data, helps you build your AI stack with confidence.

Collaboration with the German government

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has made a bet on Nextcloud to foster digitization of the state affairs, including the AI strategy. In collaboration with the State Chancellery, we are developing a language model tailored to unique state administration tasks while keeping digital threats at bay. Announced with the Hub 7 release, the development of Nextcloud Assistant Context Chat is the first fruit borne from this collaboration. Read the full story to learn more.

A leap forward in global tech decentralization

In our vision, data privacy and digital sovereignty don’t go well together with the Big Tech domination. Not only do we make software enjoyed by private users, government and businesses alike, but we also want to tip the scales in the global technological decentralization. In this regard, 2023 has been a success!

Moments that mattered: event recap

Nextcloud Conference 2023

On September 16th and 17th, we hosted the annual Nextcloud Conference under the motto “Trust, Transparency, Together.” Packed with insightful talks and panels, the event aired the announcement of Hub 6, Max Schrems’ EU-US data privacy keynote, Katrin Fritsch’s keynote on green internet, and Simon Phipps’ talk about the Fourth Sector.

Looking back at the marvelous time we spent together at MotionLab.Berlin, we invite you to read the Day 1 and Day 2 recaps. Session recordings are available on our YouTube playlist:

Nextcloud Enterprise Day

This year, we organized two events for Nextcloud enterprise community — Enterprise Day in Munich on June 13 and a special Enterprise Day France on December 5. Often held bi-annually, Nextcloud Enterprise Day helps us understand the needs of the business and government markets, setting the right course for feature development and integration. If you wish to participate next year, stay tuned for the announcement!

New developer program

This year, we welcomed the new Developer Program that offers you free promotion and opens a new window of possibilities for growth.! Now you have the opportunity to build apps in any language for tens of millions of Nextcloud users worldwide. What’s more, all core apps are now fully documented with OpenAPI by OCS (Open Collaboration Services). Make use of our documentation and examples to build an app that may just become the next #1 tool of choice!

And, of course, we announced it at our conference and advanced the state of technology with Nextcloud Hub 7: you can now build Nextcloud apps in your favorite programming language! No longer is PHP the only option, but Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, Java – bring it on!

Last but not least — welcome a fully redesigned app store and the new app ecosystem offering a better UI as well as smoother downloads and installation.

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Nextcloud on field: case studies

Archdiocese of Cologne: More than 4,400 users collaborate on Nextcloud Hub

Learn how the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany enables collaboration for more than 4,400 users with Nextcloud Hub

Download

Sorbonne University implements on-premise solution with Nextcloud

Learn how the University was able to achieve digital sovereignty over their data and user accounts.

Download

The Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration

Discover how the Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration in this case study!

Download

Growing connectivity: new integrations

Notion

Slack

Pexip

Aleph Alpha

GPTZero

MemeGen

Whisper

Mattermost

Miro

Collaboard

XWiki

Have fun in 2024!

Every year is a new challenge, yet the world keeps spinning and we remain a team of people who believe in the greater good. That’s why we built Nextcloud, a mighty open-source collaboration engine set to put you back in control over your data and make your working life comfortable. Thank you all, and cheers to all the great things that await us in 2024!

The post Nextcloud 2023 Wrap-Up appeared first on Nextcloud.

The release process

Check out this video that goes through how our release channels work!

We make new versions available incrementally to user installations in our Stable channel. When a major new version comes out, we wait about one week and only when no problems are found, we start the roll out in steps of about 20% of our user base per week.

That means if you maintain several servers, some get it sooner than others. For instance, sometimes an issue is found that was not caught during our pre-release testing, so we delay the roll-out until the fix is available.

As a result, a new release is typically only available in the Stable channel after the first minor release. Sometimes it can take even a bit longer. Users can always upgrade sooner by choosing the beta channel, which typically tracks stable releases immediately after publishing.

After upgrading to the new major release from the Beta channel, you can switch back to stable where you will be notified of minor releases as usual.

Types of release channels

Whether you want the latest features, want to help with testing, or just want to wait until everything is perfectly ready to go, we’ve got options for you. We offer 4 release channels: Production, Stable, Beta and Daily. See the table below and compare to find what works best for you or your organization.

Where to choose a release channel

You can choose a release channel of your preference in the Administrator settings in your Nextcloud instance if you have installed Nextcloud from an archive.

How upgrading works

When upgrading, you can only upgrade to a newer version. Skipping major versions when upgrading and downgrading to older versions is not supported by Nextcloud. For example, if you went via ‘beta’ to 14.0.0rc4 and ‘stable’ is on 13.0.5, you’d have to wait until 14.0.0 or later is in ‘stable’ until a new update will become available.

Note: If you are looking to grab an archive of a specific version you can find links to them in our changelog.

How releases function

Normally, releases don’t show up in the updater app right away. We usually stagger releases out to watch the impact and hold off in case very serious problems pop up. In practice, most bugfix releases are available within a week, major releases to a proportion of the users on release day in the Stable channel; we will increase that percentage usually to 100% after the first bugfix release. Packages for the Release channels might be available in distributions, docker images, Snap and so on, this is up to the packagers and communities developing for those platforms.

To upgrade in the safest way possible, always update to the latest minor release before upgrading to a new version. As an extreme example, to upgrade from 9 all the way to 12.0.5, upgrade 9.0.x to 9.0.6, then upgrade to 10.0.6, 11.0.7, then 12.0.5. We try to set up our updater to do this automatically for you whenever possible.

The post Nextcloud release channels and how to track them appeared first on Nextcloud.

Who owns the files at your school?

Who owns student’s data?

Protecting data in schools, universities, and other educational institutions is paramount for the sake of organizations and their students. The security measures safeguarding personal information, external communication and collaborative work needs to be intact and transparent.

With Nextcloud Hub, educational institutions can easily protect their data stored on-premises to ensure utmost security. Let’s take a look at how Nextcloud functions for faculty, student’s and researchers.

Data privacy and compliance for educators

School administrators and educators are entrusted with the future of their students and their privacy. Student’s personal information must be safeguarded and kept on-premises at the school or university. Nextcloud ensures the utmost security so you can store, share and archive files with transparency and precision.

For many schools and universities, data privacy and compliance can be difficult to achieve when working with proprietary software. What schools can achieve with Nextcloud is local hosting of data on your own server and full control over the IT infrastructure.

Student remote learning and collaboration

Students learn best when the tech they use is reliable. They need to be able to easily collaborate with other students, work on homework and submit assignments and projects. Nextcloud offers an intuitive platform that students can use with ease and connect with from anywhere. When it comes to remote learning, Nextcloud provides:

• Video calls with break out rooms
• Real-time editing in documents
• Secure chat with peers and teachers
• File storage with administrator controls
• Integrations with popular e-platforms
• Access from web, mobile and desktop interfaces
• And much more!

Whatever the needs of your school, university, or institution, they can be met with Nextcloud.

Powerful and scaleable software for researchers

University researchers and PhD students work with a cumbersome amount of data. Some data is easy to store like files and documents, whereas others like images and video, sound recordings and measurement data take on a lot of storage capacity. The Nextcloud platform can handle large amounts of data, scales easily and can be stored locally on your server.

Success stories in education

Sorbonne University

Nextcloud provided the University with a sovereign cloud solution for their researchers, students and staff.

Read case study

Meiji University

Nextcloud Hub significantly improved convenience for students and faculty.

Read case study

Bring back control to your school or university

Nextcloud offers schools and universities full control over their data, IT infrastructure and future with the Nextcloud Hub solution. With ease of use for student’s, seamless collaboration for educators and capacity for researchers, Nextcloud can fit the needs for all departments.

The post Keep your data in your school: Use Nextcloud locally in educational settings appeared first on Nextcloud.

In this summary of our newest government case study, follow along and discover the Republic of Serbia’s unique challenges, how Nextcloud was implemented, and ultimately how our solution fits the needs for its legislators and their data.

The challenge

The Serbian government believes digitalization is expected to bring many benefits to the general public, civil sector and government institutions. Through its national digitalization project, they intend to promote digitization of state and civil institutions. One way to achieve this is through implementing a more innovative IT solution for its government.

In the past, the Serbian government relied on a VPN and SMB (Server Message Block) for
accessing and sharing files. However, it wasn’t user friendly and there were often issues that arose
that wasted IT staff resources. It was time to look for a solution.

Requirements for the project

• All data kept in Serbia
• Compliant with data privacy laws
• Supports large files
• Meets reliability and performance standards
• Supports mobile clients
• Integrate with Serbia’s national digitalization project

Choosing a new solution

IT company NETcom System d.o.o. worked closely with the National Assembly’s Operations, Communication and IT sectors to find a new solution. They proposed Nextcloud because of its ability to run your own server on-premises, enable secure document sharing, and facilitate team collaboration.

A digitally sovereign state

With the implementation of Nextcloud, the Serbian government regained control over their data and achieved digital sovereignty. The National Assembly leaders can now collaborate on projects easily and rely on everything they need in one place. They can also benefit from secure sharing of documents to external parties and be reassured by overall increased security.

The post The Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration appeared first on Nextcloud.

Governments, agencies and public services have the immense responsibility to protect citizen’s data. With the tremendous amount of choices for online collaboration tools hosted by dozens of different vendors, it is hard to keep an overview of where that data is. At the same time, strict policies forbidding employees from using random third-party platforms limits their productivity and it is hard to ensure the rules are followed.

The best solution is of course to offer a single collaboration platform that is easy to use, offers all functionality users need AND that can be trusted with sensitive data. But can you trust a third party vendor with such power? There are legal but also public image consequences of a choice of vendor.

What if you didn’t have to rely on any third party at all and you could keep data under your own control?

Amid rising concerns about digital sovereignty, many governments and public services are discovering the benefits of an open-source, on-premises collaboration platform in Nextcloud. Let’s dig into why governments around the world are choosing the Nextcloud solution.

Host your data at home

Foreign cloud providers like Microsoft and Google have obtained customers across the globe, however for those outside of the USA, there are legal and practical consequences.

One of those is being subject to the pressure of a foreign government.The U.S. has laws in place that force tech companies to release their data to US intelligence agencies as well as businesses or government agencies when a court mandates it. This can even happen under a gag order, so the entity which has its data handed over will not know about it – or only long after it happened. In short, foreign data is at risk and could be compromised at anytime whenever it is being held by US based companies. Note the wording – this extends beyond US borders! Even data in an European data center is subject to the US CLOUD Act, signed by US president Donald Trump. Despite international efforts to remedy the situation, even the EU-US Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy framework does not eradicate the risk involved.

It is far safer to house your data within trusted data servers in your country. With Nextcloud, governments and public services can be in control over their data and do not not have to worry about foreign regulations or changing laws. Out of all our government customers, hosting data in one’s own country is the highest priority that can be achieved by deploying Nextcloud.

For instance, the City of Geneva in Switzerland placed high importance on a cloud solution that is secure and compliant with data privacy law. With Nextcloud, these requirements were all possible and to prove it, even an extensive audit was executed to make sure our solution was the best fit.

Avoid vendor lock-in

A serious risk with SaaS vendors is around vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in, often designed into SaaS products, is a situation where a customer can not move away from a vendor as the switching costs would be very high. This is not just in terms of money – often, moving away means losing (meta) data, or incurring a significant period where there will be no service. Taking data out of a cloud service, for example, can take a long time, and shut down operations. Here are several identifiable risks:

1. If sanctions force the vendor to shut down their product or service, they go bankrupt, or the company is sold, the customer is stuck. If they want to update their policies that go against your protocols, they have the power to do so without informing you in advance. This kind of unreliability cannot be tolerated by government and public sector entities.
2. If the vendor raises prices, you’re stuck paying the new price.

1. If your company relies on a critical product, feature or integration provided by the vendor and they decide to discontinue it, you’re completely out of luck and will be left to find a new solution.

What’s the perfect antidote against the risks of vendor lock-in? The answer is open source. When you run open source software like Nextcloud yourself or at a local hosting provider, nobody has the power to shut down your service or lock you out of your data. Even if, for whatever reason, Nextcloud would no longer be a reliable vendor, availability of the source code and our policies on open standards would allow customers to migrate to other solutions while they keep their service running for the time inbetween.

Protect citizens data

With a growing digitization, the challenge of privacy and security becomes ever bigger. Governments can not be seen to leak data of citizens. It is paramount that government institutions have a solution in place that gives them and their citizen’s the certainty that the way they store and work with data is secure.

With Nextcloud Files, government entities can rely on secure document exchange internally and with other organizations. Security features like File Drop, group folders with advanced permissions and persistent versioning create a safe environment to work.

Boost digitization

With so many productivity tools out on the market, it’s easy to pick a few that you think are best for their main use: The fastest internal chat, the sleekest mail system and the most versatile file storage. However, constantly switching between different applications can produce a toggle tax or the cognitively taxing switch from one task to another. It also increases your reliance on multiple platforms and the companies that back them.

With a single platform like Nextcloud, all your applications from file storage to email are in one place and backed by you.

Using a single platform enables stronger productivity, collaboration and security as well as significantly lowers costs and maintenance work.

What Nextcloud offers

Nextcloud offers a modern, easy to use Content Collaboration Platform accessible through mobile, desktop, and web interfaces. Teams collaborate seamlessly in real-time documents, chat, and engage in video calls, access their email or plan meetings in calendars. As a pure software vendor, Nextcloud does not force customers to host in its data centers but works with a variety of leading partners to provide SaaS or on-premises solutions.

• Don’t hand your data to a third party
• Fully auditable code
• No vendor lock-in
• Industry leading security features
• Integrated collaboration environment

Pave your own path towards digital sovereignty

It’s never too late to start building your path towards full digital sovereignty. With Nextcloud, it can be accomplished and once you reclaim your data, you’ll never look back.

The post Digital Sovereignty for Governments with Nextcloud Enterprise appeared first on Nextcloud.

To keep up with today’s rising quality standards and enjoy the new level of working comfort, you may want to introduce a few AI tools in your software deck. Even more so, when your content collaboration platform seamlessly integrates those like Nextcloud does.

AI-powered content collaboration tools

In modern workspaces, a very fast cycle of implementing new generation productivity and collaboration instruments is evident. AI software is not an exception here. Artificial intelligence has proved to be useful in groupware and content creation apps, integrating seamlessly into the office IT. This diversity of apps allows teams to choose the tools that suits their workflow best, promoting efficiency and creativity.

One of the key benefits of integrating AI into content collaboration platforms is the significant boost in productivity and quality. AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as data analysis and formatting. This enables team members to focus on more creative and strategic aspects of their work. Moreover, with an ability to train the generative AI models on selective datasets, the outcome is technically configurable. Adding a custom touch, you can make the final content adhere to the desired industry standards and best practices.

Ethical AI concerns

However, ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI, and especially the publicly available cloud tools, are valid. One of the primary issues is the potential for bias and misinformation. AI may inadvertently generate content that perpetuates stereotypes or inaccuracies. Secondly, models provided by proprietary vendors often receive the training data in real time. It comes from the very users of the software, putting your data and your privacy commitments at risk.

And the law might not be there to protect you, at least not yet. AI companies keep successfully appealing international privacy charges to continue capitalizing on your pictures in someone’s interest.

Can AI be used ethically? The solution to the efficient and safe use of the AI in creative work is to promote conscious choice of AI-powered content collaboration tools. Equally important is to encourage continuous training and upskilling of the users.

At Nextcloud, we believe that ethical AI should:

• Be open source when it comes to the code behind the solution and the training routine.
• Be available as a self-hosted AI model within user’s infrastructure to provide ultimate control over the data.
• Grant open access to the training sets to ensure ethical and legal compliance.

Let’s discover eight AI-powered instruments that you can start using today and learn how to make informed decisions with principles of AI ethics in mind.

AI text generation

Let’s start with the simplest and the most widely applicable use for generative AI — text generation. Text tools see a booming success in creative writing since it takes a very little effort to achieve high quality results. And it doesn’t need a detailed input: even a very short prompt will bring you a rich, informative text based on massive knowledge database it has been trained on. Accessed from a browser tab or embedded in a text editor, text generation AI software is a handy addition to your routine.

However, developers of artificial intelligence models, including text generation tools, achieve the impressive delivery through exhaustive training. Very often they train the language models using your own input data. This makes online AI tools a questionable choice when working with sensitive business information.

At Nextcloud, we try to challenge this culprit. We give you freedom to choose what model to use and how your AI-powered content collaboration tools will handle your data.

Nextcloud Assistant is a text generation tool integrated in the Text app and the navigation bar that can write, summarize, and create headlines for any texts. You can host it on-premises, making sure your data doesn’t leak out to any third party. How? Read the Nextcloud AI guide to learn more about all AI apps you can use to power Nextcloud Hub.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

AI Image generation

Image generation, though less applicable in wide use scenarios, gains popularity due to rapid advancement of GANs (Generative Adversary Networks). AI delivers contextually accurate visuals that look appealing and mostly natural. With the right prompt, it can easily troubleshoot problematic image search. Image generation with apps like Dall-E and Replicate can become a staple in creating artworks for articles, social media, web pages, and even ads.

In comparison to text generation, casually creating an image using artificial intelligence requires more skill. In practice, a detailed prompt with clear structure promises a much better result. Plus, in many cases, it takes lengthy trial and error practice before you receive the anticipated outcome. That, and still a not-so-perfect state of training make professionals reluctant to use it for more serious purposes like big budget advertising, for example.

However, the technology is already here, and everybody can use it to draft imagery for web content, illustrate ideas with sketches, and create simple visuals for social media posts. In Nextcloud, you can generate images in Talk chats and text documents using the Smart Picker feature. Choose one of several available options to run via an API or on your own server to enjoy a helpful tool that you can use for a multitude of tasks.

Text Summary

Need to skim a conversation, article, or technical document? There’s no easier way to do that than generating a summary with AI. Text processing capabilities of large language models allow quickly figuring out key points and grasping the text structure to build an accurate outline of bulky text input.

Imagine having to read a 10 page paper or a long web article just to understand key findings and conclusions. AI can save hours of work without missing important points. Based on your preference, you can get a brief one-paragraph summary or a structured rundown containing all analyzed problems, examined data and proposed solutions.

Nextcloud Assistant is not only here to help with writing, but also with text analysis. It can provide compact summaries for any texts you throw in to easily paste in a text file or a message.

Nextcloud Assistant is a great tool for text analysis. It can provide compact summaries for any texts you throw in to easily paste in a text file or a message.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

Headline generation

A good headline is a major part of an article’s success. However, creative block or a lack of outsider’s perspective can sometimes get writers stuck with otherwise straightforward tasks. With generative AI, getting inspiration for a sharp and professional headline is a piece of cake.

In Nextcloud Hub, you can use Nextcloud Assistant to create headline ideas for your articles and web pages, summoning it from the navigation bar or right in the Text app. The command is pre-configured for you and doesn’t require a prompting skill.

Email thread summary

We all deal with bulky email threads at some point, and fairly often it is easy to get lost in the year-long conversation when you need to find certain information or provide a summary of your discussion. Just like getting a plain text summary, you can easily generate one based on the email history.

There are two ways to do it: manually via chat like with ChatGPT and by using a specialized summary tool. The ‘Thread Summary’ feature in Nextcloud Hub powered by Nextcloud Assistant brings the quality of communication to a whole new level while caring about your privacy.

Packed in an easy-to-use interface inside your Mail app, Thread Summary is reachable right from your thread to sum up the ideas, questions and to-dos brought up by participants. Nextcloud Assistant is open-source and hosted where you want it: on your server, in a data center you trust, or in the cloud of your choice.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

It’s not a surprise that some email threads contain sensitive business information. Exposure of such texts may threaten not only your and your company’s privacy, but also that of your valued partners and clients. We strongly advise you to only use the tools you can trust to summarize your emails unless you want to end up in somebody’s database, or even a publicly available one.

AI speech-to-text dictation

Remember the time we all dreamed of typing from our spoken word without a keyboard? In fact, the speech recognition has been around for years, but with the arrival of tools like OpenAI and Whisper it really began to shine.

Speech-to-text dictation enables you to save a great deal of time when composing texts in both communication and writing, making it a great addition to all types of AI-powered content collaboration tools. Using voice typing to compose emails, chat with colleagues, draft documents, or make notes — those are just a handful of possible applications.

In Nextcloud, dictation with AI of your choice is available suite-wise via the Smart Picker menu. It only takes one command to activate the feature, no matter where you are. Use the Smart Picker in Talk, Mail, Deck, Collectives, or other native Hub apps.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

Speech transcription

Not quite the same as dictation, speech transcription helps convert pre-recorded audio to text. Multiple apps offer such tools to get summaries for YouTube videos, converting audio and video content into articles and more.

In Nextcloud, we found a way to improve the videoconferencing experience with the very same tool. Using the features of OpenAI or LocalAI in Talk, you can record team calls and get accurate written records of the meeting delivered to you in a text file. When enabled, the feature provides you with a transcription upon the end of the meeting together with the video recording. Use it to keep the meeting records for future reference, provide summaries to your team members, or even write interview articles based on calls.

Why use Nextcloud? If you value privacy and want to keep your collaborators at ease, you can keep the recordings and transcriptions locally. Running on your server and being open-source, AI tools available in Nextcloud are ethical, transparent and leak-proof.

Translation

Quick translation in chats, documents, marketing texts, or mail communication saves time and keeps browser tabs clean. With many AI-powered services available today, you can decide where your texts are processed and what translation model is used.

We advise you to take better care of how your work travels around the web. That’s why in Nextcloud there are different translation apps available for integration. Some of them you can even run locally.

Available on-premises tools include Local translation built using Opus models developed by the University of Helsinki and LibreTranslate. Both apps are open-source and operate independently without external processing. Another option is using the DeepL translator. It provides a wide range of available languages, but uses proprietary model and connects to the DeepL website.

Face and object recognition

A technology called ‘computer vision’ allows the machine to analyze images and videos to understand and interpret their content. Based on the training data and methodology, the AI can identify patterns and features, categorize media, and select independent objects.

It is a truly vast field of artificial intelligence. Image analysis with AI introduces multiple useful applications of visual recognition and media generation, from image and video editing to real-time visual effects in video conferencing. For example, the iPhone camera roll puts photos in automatic categories and Zoom applies dynamic backgrounds to your streams using computer vision.

As with any AI that manipulates your content, you must be aware of the privacy risks. For instance, Zoom’s March 2023 TOS update directly states that the company is permitted to use your content to train its AI model:

In Nextcloud, we offer locally running object recognition tools that won’t share your content with third parties for training purposes. Recognize app in Nextcloud categorizes media in your Nextcloud Photos collection based on objects it recognizes on your pictures. For instance, faces, landscapes, food, vehicles, landmarks and buildings, and more. In Nextcloud Talk, machine learning is used to apply backgrounds and blur to your picture during the calls. To implement this feature, we use the Jitsu library and a model called MediaPipe. Both are open source and self-hosted, securing a Green rating among our AI apps.

What is Nextcloud’s Ethical AI Rating and how do you choose the right AI-powered content collaboration tools consciously? Read below!

Nextcloud’s Ethical AI Rating

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The post 8 innovative AI features to use in a content collaboration platform appeared first on Nextcloud.

What is a push notification?

At Nextcloud, push notifications are designed to protect users and their data. Since push notifications on your iPhone or Android phone depend on Apple and Google, we made an effort to implement ours with your data privacy in mind.

How do push notifications at Nextcloud work?

Thanks to the Nextcloud Push Proxy, the free, hosted service from Nextcloud, notifications are sent through the proxy and not directly to Google and Apple to prevent any data going to them from your instance.

Nextcloud’s push notifications are this secure because of encryption. When you log into one of our mobile applications (like the iOS Files app), a public and private key are generated on the device itself and the public key is sent to your Nextcloud instance. When a push notification is sent to your device, that public key is used to encrypt the data before sending it to the Nextcloud Push Proxy. Only after receiving the notification on the device, it is decrypted using the private key of the device.

Overall, our push notifications enable you to be the one in control – not even Nextcloud can gain access to your data.

Benefits of mobile push notifications

1. Doesn’t drain your battery

If you always kept your application open, your battery would drain quite fast and not be efficient at all. That’s why our push notifications are implemented right into your operating system.

2. Speed

Push notifications are instant, without delay. This makes them great for calls and messages in Nextcloud Talk.

3. Convenience

When a file or chat message is shared with you, you’re informed right away on your mobile device.

For a new chat message on iOS, a notification banner will pop up even if your phone is locked and you can directly open the file from the push notification.

For a new file on iOS, simply click on the push notification and you’re taken to your notifications page where you can then go to the file.

Whether you’re away from your laptop or not, you won’t miss any important updates.

Want to learn more?

In Nextcloud Talk for iOS and Android, we have extensive documentation for debugging and troubleshooting push notifications available. Get access in the links below!

See documentation

See documentation

The post Nextcloud’s push notifications for iOS and Android appeared first on Nextcloud.

At Nextcloud, we believe that everybody deserves privacy. With Hub 6, we released the first open-source AI assistant that is hosted where you want it to be. It can get a multitude of tasks done inside your content collaboration platform without compromising your data: in content writing, mail communication, team chats, and more.

Introducing Nextcloud AI Assistant

Nextcloud AI Assistant is a capable and versatile tool that enhances your work throughout Nextcloud Hub to keep writing, communication, and other productivity tasks simple and low effort.

Unlike other AI-powered content collaboration tools, Nextcloud doesn’t share your data with a third party technology provider to train the core AI model. This means that all data you work with, including documents, emails, chats and more, stay yours.

Nextcloud AI Assistant features are available in the main Hub navigation to help you with quick text tasks, and in several apps including Text, Mail, and soon Talk, for app-specific actions.

If you want to read about other AI tools available in Nextcloud, we welcome you to read the AI features overview or visit our documentation portal.

Quick access from your navigation bar

Whatever you are working on, Nextcloud AI Assistant is only one click away. Should you need any help with a small task like generating a headline, paraphrasing a text, or translating a sentence, just click on a icon on the top right corner of the main navigation and give the Assistant its input.

Language assistance in Text

With help of the AI Assistant, Text has you covered when it comes to perfecting your writing and text composition. The tool is available right in the text, freeing you from distractions and extra tab journeys.

Thread summary in Mail

The Nextcloud Assistant summarizes bulky email threads for you, so you save a hefty amount of time when searching back in your conversations in Mail.

All given tasks, suggestions, and questions are displayed in a clear and concise way, so you get an accurate idea of the whole history of communication.

Smart communication in Talk

In the following weeks, we are bringing the Nextcloud Assistant to Talk. Building as an intelligent chat bot, we designed it to augment your work conversations and help your team in brainstorming, planning, and clearly expressing ideas.

First and foremost, the Assistant will make sure your discussions flow freely with the ability to translate messages, write texts, and generate media as you chat.

However, we don’t plan to stop there and we want the Assistant to become a real participant in the conversation. We are gifting the bot the ability to communicate with you in a most human way possible by answering your questions and providing helpful suggestions for the issues on your agenda. For example, you can ask the Assistant to outline an event preparation plan or to draft a marketing campaign for you using real inputs from your very tasks.

Processing data completely on your server

In everything we do, Nextcloud commits to transparency and trust. Working hard to combine comfort with responsible handling of your data, we made all core AI apps in Hub, including the Nextcloud AI Assistant, fully open-source and running locally on your server.

Your data belongs to you, and not a single bit of information is shared with a third party provider to improve performance, study user behavior, or train an AI model.

You may still want to use popular services like ChatGPT and Dall-E, and we are giving you the freedom to do so in Nextcloud. Before making your decision, you can refer to the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating to find out more about how available AI apps in Nextcloud handle your data and estimate the risks related to code availability, deployment options, and access to training data.

The future: dedicated AI for public sector and more

AI is a quickly developing field. One technology that will be important going forward are text generation models optimized for specific tasks. One example is the public sector where employees are working with large amounts of complicated forms.

Together with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein Nextcloud is working to build a digitally sovereign AI model. Its aim is to accelerate the bureaucratic processes in the public sector with ethical AI-powered content collaboration tools.

The project focuses on crafting a large language model tailored to the specific needs of the offices dealing with state affairs, namely creation of highly standardized texts using accepted language style and wording, optimized search of process-specific information, and other tasks. Anonymized training data provided by the state will be used in its training.

The model in-the-making will be released as Open Source to encourage the adaptation of sovereign, ethical AI within the digitalization strategies of the governments.

There will be other fine-tuned AI models for Nextcloud appearing over the coming months and years, helping employees in all kinds of specializations with their tasks.

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