The new standard in on-premises team collaboration: Nextcloud Hub

New generation of leading content collaboration platform integrates office document editing and collaboration apps, introduces workflows, rich work spaces, file locking and more

During a keynote presentation in Berlin, Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek announced the availability of a new product from Nextcloud. Nextcloud Hub is the first completely integrated on premise content collaboration platform on the market, ready for a new generation of users who expect seamless online collaboration capabilities out of the box.

Nextcloud Hub 18 brings the following improvements to millions of Nextcloud users:

• 📁 Files – features an improved sidebar, accepting internal shares & folder owner transfership
  • 🗃 Workspaces brings context to your folders, facilitating collaboration in one place.
  • 🔏 File locking prevents conflicts editing shared files with others
• 🤖 Flow – Brings extensive, easy to use workflow capabilities to Nextcloud. Automatically turn documents in PDFs, send messages to chat rooms and more!
• 📝 ONLYOFFICE – Built in ONLYOFFICE makes collaborative editing of Microsoft Office documents accessible to everyone
• 📸 Photos – A brand new image gallery makes finding, browsing and sharing your images easier than ever before.
• 📅 Calendar 2.0 – Calendar 2.0 books Talk meetings, brings busy view for meetings and resource booking and more
• 📩 Mail – Mail 1.0 recognizes itineraries, handles rich text mails and more
• 🗣 Talk – rewritten user interface brings message delivery notifications, circles support, message replies and flow integration

Announcement video (YouTube):

Videos

Watch these videos for an overview of what Nextcloud Hub can do for you!

Nextcloud Hub offers the most advanced on premise collaboration platform complete with audio/video chat, real-time collaborative document editing, mail, calendar and contact management. Get started now!

Nextcloud 17 users can just upgrade as usual to 18, we encourage you to install the new and improved apps like Talk, Calendar, Mail, ONLYOFFICE and more. You will get notified of this recommendation on upgrade! As usual, upgrades only start to roll out after we’ve waited for initial feedback on the release, and roll-out is incremental so it can take a while until it is your turn. You can always update immediately by changing to the beta release channel, which serves 18.0.0 right now, and move back after the update!

Files

When logging into Nextcloud you are immediately greeted by Workspaces. With Workspaces you can bring context to your folders, adding notes and even todo lists and links to files on top. This is great to coordinate with your team, making sure everyone knows what a particular folder is for. The best part: Workspaces are also available on mobile!

Nextcloud Files also introduces a new, more responsive sidebar with a number of improvements. It shows other users who have access to a file, even if it is nested deep in a shared folder, and proposes a secure password you can use for a password protected share.

Accepting incoming shares is now possible, and in the sharing settings you can choose to transfer ownership of a folder to another user.

Last but not least, Nextcloud Files introduces file locking, to prevent conflicts with colleagues who are trying to edit the same files as you do. Of course with the office documents and text files in which you take notes, you can conveniently edit with others in real time, but sometimes you have to download a file to make local changes and upload it again. Simply choose ‘lock file’ in the 3-dot menu and the file will be locked until you unlock it. You can see who locked other files, and of course ping them on Talk or in the comments if you want to know why!

Flow

Flow makes it easy to automate repetitive, boring tasks. For example, let’s say you are a sales person and send quotes as PDF. You set up a flow that turns documents into a PDF when you add a tag, say ‘to-pdf’. Or, say you want to put a message in your teams’ chat room when a partner uploads files in a specific folder.

Apps can include flow elements like triggers or actions, and separate flow apps can be build. If you’re interested in building for flow, check https://nextcloud.com/developer for documentation!

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Flow with analytics

The first third party app that has flow integration is the Data Analytics app by developer Marcel ‘Rello’ Scherello. This application is designed to turn data into reports, tracking and analyzing data which can be imported through an API. Data Analytics provides modular datasources, a realtime or storage backend and flexibile visualization. Its flow integration allows it to monitor files for updates or act on other events on Nextcloud.

A video of Data analytics in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnNZafE7ECM

The wiki page about Data Analytics and Flow:
https://github.com/Rello/analytics/wiki/Flow-integration

ONLYOFFICE

Editing office documents is a basic feature users expect from a online collaboration solution. Nextcloud is proud to be the first on premise content collaboration platform to feature out-of-the-box, Microsoft Office compatible document editing through ONLYOFFICE.

With its latest release also comes improved integration, with our sidebar available so you can easily share, comment or look at older versions of the document you are working on.

ONLYOFFICE’s community edition is installed by default on a new Nextcloud installation. For users who already run Nextcloud, installing it requires just one click – like all Nextcloud apps! No need for docker containers, web server configuration or other complications.

Photos

A brand new image gallery makes finding, browsing and sharing your images easier than ever before.

Photos shows you a timeline of your photos. In the left sidebar you can find your favorites and tagged photos. You can also find pictures in all the albums you have access to, including pictures people shared with you and external storage.

We should also mention Locations which uses the Maps app. This shows where pictures are taken on the world map!

Calendar 2.0 with Talk integration

Nextcloud Hub, introduces a much refined interface rewrite of our popular Calendar app. This major release brings many user interface improvements as well as some basic feature enhancements like advanced recurrence, a busy-view for meeting planning and resource booking and more. Calendar 2.0 now has integrated Talk rooms, allowing users to add a chat and video call to a meeting.

Mail 1.0 recognizes itineraries!

Nextcloud Hub marks the introduction of Nextcloud Mail 1.0. This release introduces the ability toe extract travel information from emails. Mails from airlines or train companies will be accompanied with an easy overview of your travel plans and the trip can be easily added to the Calendar.

The 1.0 release marks a large improvement for Mail, with full support for rich text mails, improved account handling, signatures and more. Version 1.1 is already scheduled for early February and will introduce improved caching and threaded mail view.

Talk

Talk 18 features a rewritten user interface with a focus on improving the chat experience of users. A few highlights:

• 📫 message delivery notifications & delayed messages so users can keep typing messages while they get delivered in the background
• 🔍 a new interaction with the conversations sidebar, adding a search on top and a dialog to create a new conversation
• 👥 Integration with Circles allowing users to use these custom groups in Talk
• 🗣 Replies using quotes
• 🤩 Big emoji’s when they are the only thing in a message
• 🔔 New message notification for background tabs

To prevent accidental clicks, Talk will warn you during a call that navigating away from the page will end the call.

Besides the direct improvements to Talk it is worth noting the benefits from integration with Flow and the Calendar.

As always – this has been a big release, with many improvements! And it would not have been possible without the help of our amazing community. Thank you all!!!