Nextcloud Hub 6: Focus on people

Hub 6 supports healthy meeting culture and introduces private AI assistant, reduces notification load, and simplifies scheduling tasks

September 16, Berlin – Nextcloud Hub 6 launched at the Nextcloud Conference, emphasizing user-centric design, transparency, and control.

The release introduces features that support a healthy meeting culture, like showing the speaking time of participants and giving a warning at the 60-minute mark. A ubiquitous reminder feature enables users to ’snooze‘ emails, files, or chat messages and be reminded of them at a later point. Transcripts of calls can be created and discussed to-dos can be tracked in call summaries.

Introducing private AI assistant

This release introduces an on-premises Nextcloud Assistant, build on a locally running large language model that enables users to summarize text or email threads, change writing to be more or less formal, translate chat messages, and more. The private AI assistant is available Nextcloud-wide and also integrated to provide additional features in Nextcloud Mail, Nextcloud Text and Nextcloud Talk. The AI features are optional and administrators have a choice between various Open Source on-premises and SaaS solutions. Nextcloud’s Ethical AI rating provides transparency in the privacy and data sovereignty implications of the various options.

Feature improvements

Nextcloud Files introduces an improved file picker, an easier-to-use file-sharing design, and flow, as well as further improvements to Advanced Versioning, introducing the ability to compare file versions in the user interface. File upload performance to S3 was improved significantly in the mobile and desktop clients, which also introduced image viewing and editing improvements and tighter integration between the various other mobile apps in the ecosystem like Talk, Tasks, and Deck. Enterprises will appreciate the improvements to Nextcloud Tables, allowing live links to resources within a table and introducing support for multiple independent views on a table, with powerful filter abilities and individual access rights.

Developer improvements

Developers will now find all APIs documented through OpenAPI, making it easier to connect from a variety of third-party applications to Nextcloud for storing and sharing files, accessing metadata like comments, or reading and sending chat messages. Nextcloud Talk introduces webhook-based bots, allowing integration with a wide variety of external applications.

In a major development, this release is the first to introduce a new app ecosystem innovation: the ability to build Nextcloud apps in languages other than PHP. Apps can be written in any REST-supporting language, and a convenience library was built for Python, with two example apps. The new architecture offers significant stability, security, API longevity, and scalability benefits.

The new release is available immediately for download on nextcloud.com/install

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud Hub is the industry-leading, fully open source, on-premises team productivity platform, combining the easy user interface of consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud Hub brings together universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting them under direct control of IT and integrated with existing infrastructure.

Nextcloud’s easy and quick deployment, open, modular architecture and emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing file storage assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit nextcloud.com/about