We are excited to officially announce this year’s Nextcloud Conference and Contributor Week!

If you’ve never attended our conference before, we invite you to check out the highlights and insights from last year’s Conference and Contributor Week. Last year’s program will give you an idea of a tentative schedule and our blogs covering day 1 and day 2 will show you more of what it’s all about!

Please stay tuned for more details about the official conference agenda, exciting speakers and more. You can also stay up to date on our social media channels, community forums and website for updates and announcements.

Contributor Week from September 16-20

As is custom, after the Nextcloud Conference weekend we continue the fun with our famous Contributor Week at the same location, MotionLab.Berlin!

From September 16-20, we invite you to join us to collaborate on Nextcloud improvements in design, functionality, stability, performance and features. It is a unique opportunity for developers to dive deep into the codebase, exchange ideas, and work closely with other Nextclouders. The atmosphere is vibrant and collaborative, fostering an environment of learning, growth, and innovation. By the end of the week, participants not only have gained invaluable experience but also made significant contributions to the Nextcloud project, helping to shape its future. Contributor Week at the Nextcloud conference is a celebration of open-source collaboration, fostering a strong sense of community and collective effort.

We share code, thoughts, inspiration, beer and knowledge, working in areas like:

• Coding (PHP, JS, C++, Objective-C, Java)
• Design & Front-end
• Testing
• Translation & Documentation
• And more!

Event location the inspiring MotionLab.Berlin!

Supporting diversity in open source

Diversity strengthens a community. The Nextcloud Include initiative helps underrepresented groups to join the Nextcloud project, building an inclusive and diverse space where we collaborate and develop world-class software.

We want to support participants from underrepresented groups in Open Source to join Nextcloud Conference by sponsoring part or the whole of their transportation and accommodation costs.

Book your free ticket in advance

Mark your calendars and get ready to join us for an unforgettable Nextcloud Conference in the inspiring MotionLab.Berlin! Together, let’s empower individuals and organizations to take control of their data in a privacy-respecting and secure manner.

We look forward to the conference and hope to see as many of you as possible for another awe-inspiring year!

Please note that the last quarter of the year is a busy one in Berlin. We try our best to avoid overlap with major events happening in the city, but there’s major events every day in Berlin so we recommend you to plan ahead, and book sooner rather than later!

The post Nextcloud Conference 2024: Sept. 14-15, Berlin – Register now! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Hi Nextcloud community!

as we are announcing Nextcloud Hub 8 here at the Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Munich, our customers and partners are presenting their own and unique use of Nextcloud. Tens of millions of users trust Nextcloud to protect their data.

These include private users, running their own Nextcloud, or using a hosted solution from the likes of América Móvil or Deutsche Telekom. Businesses, keeping data on their own servers or hosting at one of our official partners. And the public sector, with universities, cities, governments and international organizations like Amnesty International using Nextcloud to stay safe. They maintain their own servers or host with partners like Bechtle that offers tender-free Nextcloud for the public sector in Germany.

We build Nextcloud to give you control over your data. In terms of who has access, but also what. Our world is digital, and AI is digging through all its data. It can use that for good – create fun meme, summarize your mails or help medical research. But should it operate heavy machinery or be used in the courts or HR departments?

While society finds its way through these dystopian questions, we make sure you have control. Different options, plus transparency over what AI does and how helps you make informed choices. That aligns with our core values of transparency, community and collaboration.

This release introduces many abilities specifically for the public sector. Some of those are AI related, developed together with public sector partners like the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, presenting here today. Others tick off important requirements like our new European accessibility certification, improved scalability or federated chat. But all of these benefit every Nextcloud user, at home, in an office or working in a cafe somewhere!

This release is faster, scales further, and gives you more control over your data than ever before. Whether you watch our release video or read the blog, we are looking forward to your feedback, and, as always, hope Nextcloud serve(r)s you well!

Performance is now

Nextcloud Hub is the place where everything you need to be productive comes together in a connected, user-focused platform. Working on the improvements in Nextcloud Hub 8, we set a goal to give you half of your day back so you can take a breather!

Nextcloud Assistant 2.0

The first change comes in the introduction of the Nextcloud Assistant version 2. Context awareness mechanics introduced with Context Chat and Context Write lets the Assistant know even more about your work than you do. Worry not about privacy — Assistant is itself a part of your Hub and doesn’t send your data anywhere.

Nextcloud Teams

Shifting gears to teamwork, meet Nextcloud Teams — the next evolutionary leap for Circles. Teams arrives in Hub with the new team overview, quick access to shared resources, and a dashboard widget. And we are only getting started!

Speedy new Mail

A hefty part of your day you spend in Mail. With Hub 8 we made it faster — so you can go home earlier. The background sync is now twice as fast, the improved UI ensures comfort for a smooth morning catching-up, while replying takes less time with the addition of AI-powered suggestions.

Advanced Talk

Reaching out to users from another Hub is a breeze with federated messaging in Talk. More on Talk features, we added message editing, sparing you the delete-and-rewrite dance. Many improvements come your way in conferencing too, making presenting and group calls more comfortable and efficient.

Optimized Files

Hub 8 gets you to your files faster. Enjoy your private, clutter-free space with a Personal files section. Share downloads with confidence using one-time links. Preview and edit files linked across Hub with new interactive widgets. Discover optimized navigation for photos.

And so much more in Hub 8!

BITV 2.0 certification, incredible improvements in Tables, more automation in Forms, major performance updates in Office, and many other news are waiting for you in Hub 8. Get it now to see for yourself, or buckle up as we lead you through every new feature you need to know about.

Nextcloud Assistant 2.0

Build an efficient, sovereign, AI-powered workspace with Hub. Welcome Nextcloud Assistant 2.0, new integrations and new AI deployment mechanics.

Ask Assistant about your own assets

Hub 8 enables Nextcloud Assistant’s new context awareness features. One of them is Context Chat, a smart chat bot that can access your data and answer questions about your documentation, contracts, papers, reports or anything else. You can manually define the scope and even limit it to a specific folder or file for more precision.

Here you can enter your prompt.

You can optionally choose what documents should be used

And here are the results!`

And it’s not limited to Files: we developed an API that allows Assistant to look into Mail, Calendar, Talk, Deck and other apps to fetch info about important meetings, tasks received via emails and chats, and any other data from those apps. Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to gradually implement the Context Chat API across the Hub ecosystem, making Context Chat ever smarter.

Texts written your way with Context Write

Context Write is another new feature of Nextcloud Assistant powered by context awareness. It can derive context from existing files to convey their unique tone, wording, and even structure to create new texts with the data you provide. Tell the Assistant about your working experience and give it a nice CV file, and it will create a custom CV for you. Share meeting notes and ask it to write a formal report similar to your reference – done!

Generate Mail replies and automate events in Calendar

With Hub 8, we add more Assistant features to Groupware tools. Get reply suggestions based on your conversation history in Mail. Create Calendar events from emails without leaving the Mail app, automatically generate event titles and descriptions, and even an agenda. Go ahead – take an extra coffee break!

Chat summaries in Talk

Summarization of team meetings and spontaneous brainstorms in Talk chats makes it easy to get a refresher on previous discussions. The new AI Talk bot can recap your conversations, describe the discussed topics and define tasks based on chat activity. Give it a preferred time to deliver the summary, and it will send it in the chat when scheduled.

Prompt history and even more tools in Assistant

Assistant 2.0 gives you even more control. Access prompt history when you need to reuse your past prompts, and ask the Assistant to stop unfinished tasks if no longer needed. We also gave even more functionality to the Assistant, adding built-in image generation and speech to text features.

Synchronous tasks in Text

Text now supports running Nextcloud Assistant tasks in a synchronous way. If your AI provider is able to return the results fast enough, the Assistant can deliver them in the window right away. If it takes longer, you can choose to run the job on the background and get notified once it’s done.

Assistant on-the-go

Access Assistant from any device on the go to draft texts, compose mail responses and create social media messages — with Nextcloud Assistant now available in mobile clients.

Deploying AI

For these AI features to work smoothly, you will need some serious hardware. This unfortunately will not be a fun experience on your Raspberry Pi. But! Luckily, a number of businesses have started to provide AI-as-a-Service, running various open source models that Nextcloud supports in a way that you can connect to remotely. While this is great, unfortunately nearly all these companies are American-based, with a few in China. If you live in the USA, that is of course perfect – the data stays in your jurisdiction, and you have a choice of local providers. But for our users in Europe, this is less than ideal. The US jurisdiction unfortunately treats the data of European users with less than ideal respect for privacy, in no small part thanks to the CLOUD act signed into law by the former US president Donald Trump.

we have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves.

OVHcloud is thrilled to collaborate with Nextcloud in delivering state-of-the-art Digital Sovereign AI solutions to our customers. We are aligned with Nextcloud’s commitment to offering secure, privacy-conscious AI functionalities that safeguard training data and adhere strictly to GDPR regulations. We are excited to announce that this integration will become available in Q2 2024, marking a significant milestone in our journey towards responsible AI innovation.

Germain Masse, AI Product Marketing Manager at OVHCloud

We are proud to offer Nextcloud customers a solution that complies with European data protection regulations. Reliable, trustworthy, and local AI services will be key to protecting their digital sovereignty for both the public and private sectors in Europe.

IONOS

plusKI brings cutting edge, open source AI technologies in a compliant and digitally sovereign service to the German market. We are excited to work with Nextcloud to make this available to their customers as back-end to the new generation of the Nextcloud Assistant.

Christian Schmitz, Director Open Source at plusserver

Ready for mission-critical deployment

We know that AI works miracles when it comes to automation: it can make your work easier, save your time and hopefully get you back to your family and friends sooner each day. But we’re also aware of its downsides, some similar to the challenges brought about by the big tech firms, some unique to AI.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. We want to offer you the best of AI, but also provide transparency and choice. You’re the one who decides where and how to use AI in Nextcloud and equally how to balance its benefits with privacy, environmental impact, and more.

More about our approach to AI and Ethical AI Rating

Building sovereign AI in collaboration with the German government

Nextcloud teamed up with the government of German state Schleswig-Holstein to build sovereign AI tools for state administration needs. This will allow the state office to amplify process automation, create value for domestic digital economy, and notably set an example for AI strategy building within public sectors in Europe and beyond.

Interactive widgets

No more jumping between apps. With Hub 8, we introduce the ultimate shortcut.

Edit meeting notes in a Talk chat while video conferencing, scroll through a project Deck board on a Collectives page, or add a whole interactive calendar to your planning file in Text — you name it. With interactive widgets in Hub, you can quite literally embed one app into another.

View and edit files

Using widgets, you and other users with access can view the linked file contents and make edits without leaving the app. To prevent accidental edits, file widgets in Talk open in view-only mode by default.

Embedded Calendars

Now you can embed a full calendar in many Hub apps to quickly browse events, dates, and schedules. Respecting your privacy, Nextcloud only shows the embedded calendar to users with access, while for others it will remain blank.

Integrated Deck boards

Manage tasks and deadlines anywhere in Hub. Paste a Deck board to browse the contents, open and manage the cards, and even access search and settings.

Nextcloud Office

Better team and project management in Office. Even more automated, even more connected, and even more collaborative.

Manage like a pro with Teams

Nextcloud Teams is a new step for Circles, with a redesigned team overview, a Dashboard widget, and new features to streamline team management. Browse team resources like Deck boards, Talk rooms and Collectives in the team menu. Add new items to share them in an instant. Shared files and calendars are coming soon.

Publicly share Collectives pages

Sharing knowledge with Collectives is now easier, as we take a lot of extra actions off your shoulders. Share individual Collectives pages with included sub-pages via public links. Manage all link shares via sidebar Share tab. Create multiple links with individual permissions to improve security when sharing externally.

Link Forms to sheets

Link forms to spreadsheets to automatically submit collected data to ODS, XLSX, or CSV files. Re-export, create new sheet copies and edit the linked sheets to add more columns with comments, statuses and any other data you need.

Spreadsheets: cell protection, tooltips, and improved filtering

New features in spreadsheets aim to boost security and integrity of your spreadsheets and greatly improve overall usability. Cell protection allows preventing unwanted changes in selected cells, intentional or not, and managing individual permissions for cells. When typing a function name, a tooltip will show you relevant functions to assist you in search. Filtering has been improved with the AutoFilter feature and new filtering options like Color and Condition.

Documents: layout improvements, better navigation and change tracking

Keep the layout of your documents neat with dedicated section editing, separate headers and footers for pages under one style, and support for STYLEREF fields. Browsing tracked changes is now easier thanks to popover tooltips and improved change highlights in tables.

Manage users you follow when collaborating

It’s now easier to follow and unfollow users in your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The currently followed user is directly visible, so you always know whom you are following. Unfollowing became more convenient too: just click on the list to resume independent browsing.

More than just Tables

Let’s talk about Tables, a versatile data processing app in the Hub ecosystem that elevates your workflow management. In Hub 8, we included improvements in Tables navigation and data imports, as well as introduce a complete new mechanic: no-code apps based on Tables.

Build custom Tables apps

Need a custom app in your Hub to manage a process, centrally access project data, or build a dedicated knowledge base? Now you can create custom Hub apps based on Tables, streamlining management of individual teams, projects, or processes. Aggregate and combine existing tables and views and add them as a new application to the menu bar for quick access.

Navigate your tables in a pinch

All tables are accessible from a single list that you can filter to find the most relevant items quickly. Add tables to favorites to keep them on top of the list at all times, or archive unused tables to clean your space without losing old data.

With Nextcloud Tables, we’re definitely getting to a point where we can replace traditional specialized software, (German: Fachverfahren), by storing the data structures in Nextcloud.

Sven Thomson, CIO Schleswig-Holstein

New ways to import data

Import tables from external files using the upload feature or from the right click menu from the Files app. We improved file parsing to automatically detect more items from CSV and spreadsheet files, such as dates, percentage, currency and decimals.

Transfer ownership with ease

Now users can change the owners of the tables themselves, making it easier to manage tasks without admin permissions. The setting is available in the Edit window.

Nextcloud Files

New Files, featuring your personal file management space, better navigation, and even more ways to share.

Files, your own

Getting lost in a massive amount of shared documents? Enjoy a clean space for yourself with the Personal files section to find all of your own files and folders. Accessible from the web and Nextcloud clients, your documents, drafts, photos, invoices and other items are always close at hand. Plus, we added file recommendations to help you get to recently edited files faster.

One-time links and QR-codes

Sharing is even more secure now with one-time download links. When you wish to share a download with a single user and don’t want the link passed around, check the corresponding box in the link settings. What’s more, now you can generate QR-codes on the spot to share links with ease on web pages, slides, printed materials, and more.

Pictures where you want them

In Hub 8, we added one of the most anticipated features for the Photos app: a dedicated Media folder for all your pictures. Your space no longer shows those annoying memes your colleague keeps sending over, and instead displays photos from the chosen folder. Previews also run smoothly now with ‘blur hash’ so you can scroll through your library more quickly.

Photos widget for Dashboard

While we were at it, we also created a nice Dashboard widget for Photos: it shows you a picture from the past. Good memories, we hope!

Nextcloud Talk

Meet an optimized Talk with much smoother team meetings, Federated chatting, new mechanics in messages including editing, Flavored Markdown and much more.

Message editing

Here’s to cleaner chat! Now you can edit messages in talk to correct typos, update information and add new lines without following up in a separate message. Edits are possible for 6 hours after the message is sent.

Federated chatting

Federated Hub becomes even more united. Now users from all teams can create group chats across federated Talk instances and use many Talk features like mentions, polls, and chat notifications. And even more to come in the future!

For federated chatting, we use the open standard Open Cloud Mesh (OCM) developed at CERN with the help of Nextcloud and other open source projects. The same standard is in use for federated file sharing. In the future, we are planning to expand this into federated Calendar sharing and other features.

Smoother team meetings

Now you can drag the speaker video to pick the best position to fit shared screen content. Current speaker is highlighted in the list for more visibility during large group calls. Call UI is greatly improved: access chat descriptions and post polls during calls, navigate chat messages without interruptions, and more.

New text styles

With Flavored Markdown now supported in Talk, you can make your messaging even more visually rich and informative. With syntax included in Flavored Markdown, you can create tables, add interactive check boxes and format text as a strikethrough.

About using Markdown in Talk

Nextcloud Groupware

In Hub 8, we focused on improving the performance of the whole Groupware bundle, delivering faster Mail with notable design adjustments, more automation and comfort in Calendar, better external compatibility, and more.

Faster, smarter, sleeker Mail

Find the right words with reply suggestions

Don’t have time to compose a well worded, professional reply? Hint: Use AI! Nextcloud Assistant in Mail now generates reply suggestions for you, so you can send a response to incoming mail based on your context in no time.

Enjoy a much faster sync

IMAP accounts without CONDSTORE extension can now sync 2x faster to enjoy a much more agile Mail experience.

Create events with automatic info

Enjoy even more automation! Now you can quickly create an event from the email thread using the More actions >> Create event action. Nextcloud Assistant will automatically pick the event title and description, and even create an agenda based on your conversation.

Save the date: Calendar improvements

Redesigned event window

We improved the event overview window and sidebar view, rendering a more comfortable layout and introducing two window modes: View mode and Edit mode.

Suggestions for free/busy times

In Nextcloud Mail, you can view the free/busy times of attendees to arrange the best time for your meeting. What if the time slot you picked doesn’t work for everybody? In Hub 8, Calendar automatically suggests the next suitable time slot on their availability and let’s you adjust the event in one click.

What’s more, in the redesigned availability window you can quickly manage the event: change the event time or add and remove the attendees.

Nextcloud ecosystem

Together with the Hub 8 release, we roll out new features for external apps, add new integrations, and amplify our whole app ecosystem with new mechanics.

Pop-up update summaries

The change log pop-up feature enables you to deliver update summaries straight to your users in a form of a notification. List new features, bug fixes and improvements and ship them in the appropriate format depending on the user’s role: admin or general user.

Discover in App Store

The new Discover section aims to create a more engaging experience for App Store users. It features curated app suggestions, themed collections, and various related content such as interviews, podcasts, and resources. To app developers, it is also an opportunity to greatly amplify visibility of their apps.

New integrations

Paperless-ngx is an open-source document management solution designed to help you organize and navigate your paperwork with a variety of complimentary features like OCR.

• Transform physical documents into a digital archive
• Organize and customize your library, enjoy advanced navigation
• Use a variety of extra features like OCR and Tesseract

Build apps for Nextcloud!

Whether you want to create mobile apps that connect to Nextcloud, integrate independent apps in Hub, or build dedicated apps, we’ve got you covered! You can build applications in any programming language, make use of our complete API documentation, and follow ready tutorials to get inspired.

Speaking of which, we are constantly extending our library of app tutorials, and this time we added two awesome new guides: a hello world app tutorial and a guide to using Github Codespaces as a developer environment.

New app ecosystem features

The app ecosystem update gives new liberties to app developers. With declarative syntax, now you can define custom setting screens for admins and end users. Opening opportunities for deeper integration with Nextcloud, we made it possible to inject a full user interface in Nextcloud. To aid the contributing developers in localization efforts, we also let you get help from our translator community using Transifex.

Nextcloud Clients

We worked on Nextcloud clients for all platforms, adding some great features to extend functionality and improve performance.

VFS support in macOS app

With Hub 8, we are releasing a new client for macOS that has support for the Virtual File System (VFS). The new sync engine adds more agility to file browsing, presenting all of the files available on the server without downloading them and taking extra disk space. These files will only be downloaded when you need to interact with them.

Easier app updates on Windows

Great news for our Windows users: new versions of the desktop client can now be installed without user intervention in most cases, making the update process smooth without disrupting your work.

MDM in the Android app

Enterprise customers will be glad to read that the Android app now has Mobile Device Management (MDM) integrated. The feature allows you to manage the mobile devices connected to your Nextcloud and therefore greatly improve security controls.

Design improvements for iOS client

iOS client for Files received major design rework in many areas:

• Cleaner navigation bar with new dropdown menu
• New account switcher
• Ability to show/hide the description
• Optimized action sheet
• Improved grid view for files
• Improved icons throughout the app

New level of performance

Organizations big and small rely on Nextcloud to supercharge their collaboration. That’s why we take performance and stability very seriously. Efficient software is not only about getting things done fast and serving a large base of users, it is also about reducing energy consumption and running on diverse infrastructures without losing efficiency.

With this release, we started working on the Database Sharding which lets you split Nextcloud database into several smaller databases and to distribute it among a few smaller servers. The basis for Database Sharding is already here, and we are planning to work on it moving forward to bring the opportunity to our users.

Another noteworthy improvement is in continuous work on the Read-After-Write behavior. Current architecture requires synchronous replication, which reduces the number of database cluster nodes to 4. In the future, we will support an unlimited number of Read nodes that are using asynchronous replication.

These efforts in boosting Nextcloud performance will allow us to accommodate up to 10x more users within a single cluster, moving the scalability of Nextcloud to a whole new level.

This, and numerous smaller but meaningful updates in the frontend make the Nextcloud experience much smoother, not only tackling the challenges of the large setups but also improving the performance for every user. After all, it’s all about giving you more time, achieved with scrutiny of every detail.

Ready to get the feel of the new Hub?

From continuous work on AI features and interface optimization, to various new shortcuts between apps and performance improvements — we tried to make Hub 8 worth your while. This is a result of the meticulous work of our growing team of engineers and designers, our contributors, and the whole of Nextcloud and its community.

Thank you for reading and sticking to the end! We took some of your time with this hefty blog, but we promise to give some of it back with Hub 8!

Get Nextcloud Hub 8

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 8 here!

Get Hub 8

You can download Nextcloud Hub 8 from our installation page. Among available options, you can use a zip file or the all-in-one image for fresh installation.

Over the coming weeks, we will make it available to our home users via updater using the usual staged roll-out process. You can switch to the beta channel temporarily if you want to try the new Hub right away. Don’t forget to switch back to stable after you’ve updated to Hub 8!

Note: Nextcloud caches the results coming from our updater server, so it can take some time for the new version to show up and you likely have to refresh the page, wait a bit, then try again.

How to update: AIO users

For new Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) users, you can install Hub 8 directly by checking the “Install Nextcloud 29” box.

We have a dedicated setup guide for AIO users. Follow the guidelines to easily set up Hub 8.

The Nextcloud Enterprise version of Hub 8 will become available soon, once we successfully run the additional testing and complete certification.

Nextcloud One: a fully managed cloud platform

Nextcloud One is a fully managed Nextcloud offering from our new partner EpikShare. It is a comprehensive service where the hosting, maintenance and management of a Nextcloud instance are fully handled.

Nextcloud One ensures strict compliance with global data protection standards, including GDPR. This platform integrates workflow management tools, such as rule-based file tagging and access controls, with auditing capabilities, ensuring data oversight and security.

Nextcloud One is hosted within the stringent, privacy-focused jurisdiction of Germany and as such provides a secure, efficient and fully managed Nextcloud environment.

Discover the power of Nextcloud One! We invite professionals who work alone or in small teams to explore how Nextcloud One can help them collaborate in a digitally sovereign, compliant way. Visit their website today and start your journey for free with a fully managed Nextcloud solution.

Thank you to our community!

Nextcloud runs on community power. Users, contributors and developers who dedicate themselves to making Nextcloud better every day are the life force that drives our project. With our whole heart, we thank everyone involved in making the new Hub happen.

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The post Regain control over your time with Nextcloud Hub 8 appeared first on Nextcloud.

Finding the right video conferencing software can be a challenge.

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.

Here at Nextcloud we love reasons to celebrate data privacy, to continue exploring and improving our privacy goals. Respecting privacy is a deep aspect of our company and community culture, our shared mission, and a concept we interact with daily. With Data Privacy Week in full swing, we’re excited to be part of the conversation — and part of the solution — in regaining and maintaining privacy of your personal and corporate data.

We encourage you this week to be introspective, to re-evaluate your current privacy landscape, and to explore steps you can take to regain aspects of your data privacy. And in case you’re already a privacy advocate, we encourage you to help guide others to a more private digital lifestyle!

Who owns your…

If you’ve met us at conferences and corporate events around the world, you may have seen our swag with memorable nudging queries:

We encourage you to ask yourself regularly: Where is your contact book stored, and who has access to that data? What about your calendar, or your email? Medical data? Your location?

And with everyday technology’s every-evolving pace, we can also begin to ask: Who owns your AI prompts? Your intellectual property and corporate secrets? What of your home surveillance videos? Your Bitcoin wallet?

Recommended everywhere

We’re proud that together with our open source community we’ve built the industry’s leading privacy-respecting online collaboration platform as recommended everywhere. PrivacyTools.io highlights Nextcloud in their list of „Top 10 Privacy Tools“ and „Best Encrypted Cloud Storage in 2024„. PrivacyGuides.org features Nextcloud at the top of many categories from Productivity Tools and Collaboration Platforms, to File Sync.

Think Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud, except that you have complete control over where and how your files are stored.

ProPrivacy’s review of Nextcloud

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Most trustworthy cloud storage… With Nextcloud, you, of course, decide where to keep your data.

ZDNET’s Best Cloud Services of 2024

Read more

Nextcloud’s many privacy solutions

Nextcloud Hub, our collection of tools all under one unified platform, offers many solutions to help you secure your private data.

• Nextcloud Photos — backup, store, and enjoy your photos, privately.
• Nextcloud Notes — secure, mobile note-taking in your back pocket.
• Passwords Managers for Nextcloud — keep your accounts safe with better password strategies.
• Nextcloud Talk — private chat and video conversations for family, friends, and the office.

Local, private Artificial Intelligence

Several types of AI integrations are also available throughout Nextcloud Hub, from completely self-hosted options to integrations with external services. For a fully private AI experience, all self-hosted AI features in Nextcloud are built-in and run completely on your server, meaning none of your data leaves your premises and you’re in full control. We encourage you to read more about our Ethical AI Rating system, our dedication to transparency, and the various AI-assisted features available to you:

• AI in Nextcloud: what, why and how
• Meet the Nextcloud AI Assistant

Open Source: non-private code by design

When it comes to assuring privacy and security concepts are upheld in our software, we actually prefer to share our development in the open; transparent for all to see, inspect, share and participate in. Following open source development practices is deeply embedded in our identity, building trust in both the people and the code that goes into Nextcloud.

Curious? Explore what thousands of contributors create together on our GitHub!

Where to start?

While we firmly believe your data privacy is equally important every week of the year, we hope this Data Privacy Week encourages you to consider your current practices, and where you can take action to improve your data privacy. There’s plenty of opportunity to make improvements, collaborate with others, and to have fun along the way. We hope, too, that our excitement to make Nextcloud a central part of your data privacy toolkit helps make your journey that much more successful.

We all deserve privacy — after all, it has been declared a UN Human Right. Our goal is that together we can help make private-by-default the standard in all our technological endeavors.

Streamline your move to Nextcloud with our migration tools

We’ve created a number of migration tools to help you easily transition from platforms like Google, Microsoft, and more. With just a few clicks, you can move your documents, photos, chat logs, and calendar items into Nextcloud — a platform trusted by millions of users worldwide.

We currently offer migration tools for Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, and ownCloud to help you create a smooth transition, whether you’re a family or an enterprise.

We look forward to joining you on your data privacy journey! We also encourage you to discuss your data privacy with your family, friends, colleagues and those who care for your data.

The post Data Privacy Week: Who owns your data? appeared first on Nextcloud.

Unser Engagement für demokratische Werte

Nextcloud verpflichtet sich zur Demokratie, Pluralismus und einer humanen Gesellschaft und unterstützt aktiv öffentliche Akteurinnen und Akteure, um demokratische Institutionen zu stärken. Wir sind überzeugt, dass die Bewältigung der Probleme, die faschistischen Ideologien zugrunde liegen, aktive Beteiligung und konstruktiven Dialog erfordert. Unsere Position ist deutlich: Wir befürworten friedliches und respektvolles Zusammenleben und stehen entschieden gegen jede Form von Ausgrenzung und Rassismus.

Die Bedeutung von Vielfalt und Inklusion

Bei Nextcloud wird Vielfalt nicht nur gelebt, sondern als wertvolles Gut geschätzt. Unser Einsatz für Inklusivität spiegelt sich in den Werten wider, die auch die Demonstranten vertreten. Mit einem Team, das mehr als 22 Länder repräsentiert, bilden wir eine Gemeinschaft, die eine globale Perspektive einnimmt und unsere Unterstützung für Proteste gegen ausgrenzende und undemokratische Ideologien verstärkt. Wir stehen solidarisch mit jenen, die sich der AfD entgegenstellen und teilen deren Engagement für den Schutz der Demokratie und die Bekämpfung des Hass.

Ausblick

Wir fordern führende Unternehmen der Technologiebranche auf, sich uns in unserer entschiedenen Ablehnung ausgrenzender Ideologien anzuschließen und nicht länger zu schweigen. Dies ist essentiell für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und das Wohlergehen der deutschen und europäischen Wirtschaft, sowie für das gesellschaftliche Zusammenleben. Gemeinsam für eine bessere Zukunft: Nextcloud ruft alle unsere Partnerinnen und Partner, Kundinnen und Kunden sowie die gesamte Technologiebranche auf! Lasst uns zusammenarbeiten, um eine Gesellschaft zu fördern, die Offenheit, Respekt und Vielfalt hochschätzt. Jeder Beitrag, unabhängig von seiner Größe, ist auf diesem Weg von großer Bedeutung. Vereinen wir uns, um gemeinsam einen nachhaltigen Unterschied in der Welt zu schaffen.

The post Stellungnahme: Nextcloud steht für eine offene und freie Gesellschaft appeared first on Nextcloud.

As the 2023 is coming to an end, we decided to run a Nextcloud Community Survey to better understand your experience, satisfaction, wishes, and your very role in the Nextcloud community.

Your unique perspective is what helps us draw a big picture and understand how we can make everyone’s experience even better. But it’s not only about Nextcloud products — the survey is also a way to monitor community health and provide a reliable feedback channel to our contributors.

We estimate the survey to take 7-15 minutes depending on your role and experience. We used Nextcloud Forms, a private and easy-to-use tool developed by Nextcloud.

Keeping surveys private with Nextcloud Forms

To run our surveys, we use our own tool called Nextcloud Forms. It is a simple yet capable app that doesn’t imply any limitations on survey or question count. Hosted locally, it gives you full control over your data and keeps even the most cautious respondents confident.

The post Take part in the Nextcloud Community Survey! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Dropbox has recently ‘dropped’ a new enabled-by-default feature that has users worried about their data privacy. As almost every company in tech these days, Dropbox is latching onto the new capabilities of AI – specifically OpenAI – with a questionable approach to user privacy.

Last Wednesday, social media buzzed with apprehension over Dropbox’s new AI feature that shares data with OpenAI to perform an experimental AI-powered universal search across user data on the platform. As reported by Ars Technica and other media, the on-by-default setting led to understandable upset from many Dropbox users.

While Dropbox does offer the option to opt-out of their new feature, something that sends your data to a third party company shouldn’t be on by default without first checking with the user if they’re okay with it. At the very least, they could have enabled a pop-up dialog the first time they showed the feature, explaining the consequences and offering that opt-out in an easy way.

When we at Nextcloud introduced our AI feature set in early 2023, we recognized the challenges intrinsic to Artificial Intelligence, and from day 1 have prioritized total transparency, choice, availability to users, and the honoring of adjoining ethical implications. Nextcloud Hub features rich AI offerings with an always privacy-first approach: while many are available, our remote-AI features are optional and disabled-by-default, never exposing user data without your knowledge or consent.

For example, we released an article recently that reiterates our AI approach and explains the difference between our completely self-hosted AI options versus those implemented as integrations from external parties. We then dove into each new AI feature to illustrate their utility, the different options to enable them, and any potential AI and privacy-related implications, aided by our Ethical AI Rating system.

In Nextcloud Hub 7, we just released our advanced, Unified Search that allows you to search for any file, person and more in Nextcloud. Since the data is only indexed on your server, no data leaves your server. Nextcloud can store all your data from contacts to documents and notes, so you don’t even have a need for using or interacting with a 3^rd party service if you don’t want to.

Similarly, the Nextcloud AI Assistant uses the collective data from your server to help you enhance and speed up your work with all-local AI options. You can get language assistance in your documents, summarize your email threads and Talk chats, and more.

We just shared a tech preview of our Nextcloud AI Assistant with Context Chat, a new initiative developed together with the German state Schleswig-Holstein that enables local AI models within Nextcloud to search users’ local data across the platform. While on the surface this appear similar to Dropbox Dash – their new cross-platform search utility – the key implication and difference is in the implementation: Dropbox relies solely on sending user data to OpenAI for AI-assisted processing, while Nextcloud’s Assistant with Context Chat can rely completely on in-house, self-hosted local AI models, a real privacy [boon].

What we are illustrating here is that yes, AI can give great productivity benefits. And you can bring that to users in a responsible way. Even if you’re not willing or able to offer AI features in-house or on-premises and instead want to rely on OpenAI or other big AI companies, there is no need for sharing your users’ data to such a third party without a warning.

Thank you for reading and staying up-to-date about current data privacy news that we, like you, care deeply about. We hope you find Nextcloud solves your needs and provides you unmatched opportunities to use and work with AI securely, easily, and privately. We would also love to continue the conversation: send us your thoughts via Mastodon and X (Twitter).

The post Dropbox handing data to OpenAI: the risks of AI in practice 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.

Hello everybody

This year is nearly over and the last months have been busy! Our community, Nextcloud and Frank have been recognized for their accomplishments by the European Software Freedom award and, just last week, the Acteurs du Libre award. Meanwhile, our team keeps growing quickly; the company is on track to grow its customer base by over 60% with more than 5 million new users getting access to Nextcloud this year!

Though this isn’t all the news! Our yearly Nextcloud Conference was a great success and we just published a podcast interview with one of its keynote speakers: privacy lawyer Max Schrems.

In other really big news, open source email giant Roundcube also joined our wonderful Nextcloud community!

Today though, we’re diving into Nextcloud Hub as our 7th Hub release is shared with the world. We’re sure you are super excited to learn about all that is new, so let’s get to it!

Thank you all for your amazing support this year!

The Nextcloud team

Connected, efficient and productive

Today, we’re introducing our most integrated platform yet – Nextcloud Hub 7. Imagine your work space interconnected, with your files seamlessly accessible in Talk, your calendars integrated in Mail and your tasks visible in your Calendar.

Nextcloud is designed as a unified platform, bridging all the functionality you need to get your tasks done. With Hub 7 we improved our Unified Search which finds chat messages, emails, calendar items, documents and even external content like support tickets or memes. You can bring up search wherever you are in Nextcloud.

Another major improvement was done around your out-of-office status. This can now be configured in your availability settings. It is applied not only in an out-of-office email, but also in Calendar (with an automatic out-of-office Calendar item) and in Talk, where others get notified that you’re not around.

Are you the backup for your colleague that is on vacation? Covering for them has never been so easy. Find all items you two share in their profile via Contacts: files, tasks, events, emails, and more.

From new integration features to AI enhancements and a completely rewritten Files app, Hub 7 delivers the solutions you need to foster efficiency, collaboration and productivity. Read on to discover how you can transform your work through Nextcloud Hub 7.

Search everywhere with Unified Search

Unified Search brings items from all core apps and even external locations at your fingertips. Now you can find every file, task, or communication related to your inquiry through a single search box with convenient filtering at your disposal — all in one window.

Unified Search is accessible through the magnifier icon on the toolbar’s top right corner. When searching for a popular item, it helps you stay in focused with adjustable date range. Filter search by people to find items belonging to selected authors.

Explore all of Hub…

Search and preview any items In Hub. Find apps and their contents, use multiple filters to narrow down or expand your search the way you need.

Where you can search

• Files
• Tags
• Emails
• Contacts
• Talk conversations and messages
• Deck boards and cards
• Collectives
• Circles
• Tables
• Notes
• Events
• Apps

…and beyond

Search in integrated locations like GitHub, GitLab, Giphy, Reddit, and more. Once a service is connected to Nextcloud Hub, a new search filter will be available in the list of possible search locations under “Apps and Settings”.

The out-of-office message that everybody catches

Embark on your next vacation – stress free. Set a out-of-office status that will pop up around Hub, letting everybody know you are away and who to contact instead. Configurable in the “Availability” section of your personal settings, your absence status will automatically be updated throughout the platform, with an auto-responder in Mail and a dedicated calendar event for your selected dates.

Add a catchy user status

Use a short, custom message to notify everybody about your absence. It will work as a status message for your account visible everywhere under your name: user search results, profile, contact list, and more. Add an emoji to give it a personal visual twist!

Get the details right

Use the long description to give more details: absence period, status of your tasks, and a colleague or the team who will be your replacement. Even share some details about your vacation if you want to! Everyone is informed when you are back and whom to contact instead while you are away.

In Mail

Your out-of-office message automatically takes over auto-responder during your holiday period.

In Talk

Auto-responder also works in Talk chat, popping up to everybody who enters a private conversation with you.

In Calendar

A calendar event is also created for your absence period with your status as a title and full text in description.

So, next time you’re about to go on vacation, wrap up your work quickly with Nextcloud’s automated out-of-office features. Just provide a simple message and Nextcloud does the rest.

AI and Nextcloud Assistant

Our AI team at Nextcloud has an ongoing focus on research and a dedication to evolving our AI offerings thoughtfully with every release of Hub. With new challenges arising in AI, from privacy to Big Tech centralization and environmental considerations, we must not let users fear technology with such a great potential. Or worse — carelessly give away their data. Like everything else works in Nextcloud, we don’t stop with a cool feature — we keep bringing more to the table.

Welcome Aleph Alpha and local Stable Diffusion

We help our users make informed choices while expanding their options to power up the AI functionality in Nextcloud. In Hub 7, the available selection of models is updated with inclusion of Aleph Alpha, a Large Language Model developed in Germany that can be used by the Nextcloud Assistant. This option fits users who wish to use a remote AI services but be confident that confident their data remains in Europe.

Now, you can also run an on-premises Stable Diffusion model by Stability AI for local image generation.

All open source AI models available in Nextcloud

• Llama-2
• Gpt4ALL-J
• Stable Diffusion
• Airoboros
• Whisper
• Dolly
• Bark
• Piper
• Falcon
• Bert
• GPT-NeoX
• MPT

Costs under control

While running organization-wide AI is costly, we now give you more control over expenses with request limits. Define number of requests users can submit in the admin settings to make budget planning more accurate.

Task notifications

Depending on available resources, you may have a powerful AI engine delivering instant results or choose to limit its capabilities to reduce costs. Depending on your setup, the processing time varies. If instead of waiting the user chooses to be notified, they will receive a push notification on their mobile, desktop, or web interface letting them know that the task is complete.

What’s coming next? Context Chat

Our collaboration with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein is starting to deliver its first results. Today, we are releasing a tech preview of a powerful feature for the Nextcloud Assistant: Context Chat. This feature allows the Nextcloud assistant to refer to your emails, files, chat messages and more to answer your questions about these items. It allows you to query your own data, to present your personal and organizational context to an AI model and have it help you gain personalized, unique insights that are completely private, never sent to a third party unless you so choose. Storing the data in a local vector database, Context Chat works with most available large language models, both those you can self-host and some remote options.

Nextcloud Photos

Live Photo support on iOS

Want to save your Live Photos on your Nextcloud? Now it’s possible to upload and save live photos from your iPhone to Nextcloud, and view them in the Photos app. To enable this feature, just go to Settings → Advanced and select the “Live Photo” option. From there, you can upload any photo as normal and a live photo will appear with a special eye icon. The Live Photos can be seen on the Photos app where you’ll see a Play button in the photo.

Introducing EXIF metadata support

The Photos app now displays where and when your pictures were taken, if that data is available in its metadata. The EXIF metadata associated with each picture also contains information about photographs like the camera settings, time and date, and location, which we can show:

• The time and date the photo was taken
• A map of where the photo was taken (using OpenStreetMap)
• Information about the camera used i.e. type of camera and other technical details

In addition, your photos will be sorted according to the date each photo was taken, not when the Nextcloud file was created. This is especially helpful when you want to find a photo and can only remember when you took it. You can find your EXIF data once you’ve opened a photo and go to the sidebar under the tab „details.“

Nextcloud Files

Nextcloud Files is the premier file sync & share solution

Let’s explore what’s new in Nextcloud Files, where your documents, videos and photos live. Nextcloud Files is a powerful document management system, making it easy to access, share and work with your documents wherever you are.

Files – now backed by Vue.js

The Nextcloud Files app has been rewritten, thereby migrating to Vue.js, a popular, modern web toolkit packed with possibilities. This brings a number of performance benefits you’ll appreciate:

• The code is more modular, requiring less javascript to be loaded. That means faster loading times. The devs saw the Files app loading about 65% faster!
• Preview loading and caching was improved and large folders also render a lot faster.
• A more accurate progress indicator with more information when uploading files, with also improved error handling
• We can more easily add integrations with other apps, again requiring less code to be loaded

A ton of small improvements all over the place was done, from little animations when you drag and drop files to tons of accessibility improvements that should help users who rely on a screen reader or keyboard control. A few examples:

• Support more actions with selections (add to favorites, restore from trashbin…)
• Better selection handling (shift + select to select range)
• Better error handling (if you have a selection and some actions fails, the failures will stay selected and the error message will tell you that some files had an error)
• New tags view
• Grid view support in all views (favorites, trash, recent etc)
• Unified design across all views
• Support remembering files settings per view (like sorting)
• Improved dark mode

Our goal was to make Files easier to maintain but keep the same user experience you know and love. So, while you won’t immediately notice a big change, we hope you’ll appreciate all the little touches!

For developers, the improved documentation should also help add things like file actions for example.

We hope you enjoy the new and improved Nextcloud Files.

Annotate your PDF!

Special in this release is PDF annotation support! Thanks to one of our amazing community members, it’s now possible to fill out a form or draw directly on a PDF right in your Nextcloud.

The next time you need to annotate a PDF, enable the freehand drawing feature or use text boxes to add information. Once it’s complete, you can save the updated PDF to your Nextcloud.

Customize your navigation bar

When you login to your Nextcloud, is your dashboard the first stop for you? Would you prefer Talk, Calendar or Files? With our new app order configuration, you can decide which app is the default when you login and when you click on the Nextcloud logo. You can also order the apps to have your most used apps to the left. Admins can also set some key apps in this order to ensure the experience is consistent across the server.

You can customize the order of your applications in the main navigation bar so you have your most used apps first.

Just click on your profile icon in the top right corner of your Nextcloud and select “Appearance and accessibility” for the navigation bar settings. You can easily move your apps with up and down arrows or drag and drop to find the perfect order for all your apps.

Comments and activity tabs in sidebar merged

One of Nextcloud’s most unique features in Files is the sidebar where you can see any activity on the document – like when and who did the last edit, any comments about the file, internal and external sharing options, and a tab for all the files versions. In the Hub 7 release, we decided to merge the “activity” and “comments” tabs so it’s easy to see both.

Nextcloud Office

Nextcloud Office brings collaboration to a whole new level, with several new features

Nextcloud Office is more than creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Our Office stack also consists off:

Tables

The impressive Microsoft SharePoint Lists or Airtables alternative

Collectives

The knowledge management space for your organization

Notes

The ideal note-taking app with simple features and markdown

Text

The editor extraordinaire integrated in Nextcloud Deck, Files, Collectives and Notes

QR code generation

One of the simplest ways to share a survey or landing page is through a QR code. QR codes can be easily scanned on the go and are hassle free for most audiences. So, next time you’re planning an event or simply need to share the wifi password in your office – you can create a QR code directly in your Nextcloud Office document. Simply go to “Insert” and click “QR and Barcode” where a pop-up window will allow you to add a link and generate a QR or barcode link, as well as add other details.

Conditional formatting in spreadsheets

Need to visualize a ton of data? Want to throw in some colors? Now in spreadsheets, you can select a single cell or range of cells of data and pair it with a color scheme to showcase your data more vibrantly and uniform. The conditional formatting feature is basically a way to adjust the style of a cell or range of cells based on its value. For example, if you have accounting data, easily visualize the ebs and flows of your expenses and profits by color. The conditional formatting feature is available through quick access menu in the menu bar with various presets to pick from.

Share your notes

We often brainstorm ideas individually and drop them in our notes for a quick fix. But what if you want to share those brilliant thoughts and ideas with a colleague or friend? You can now share of one of your notes in the media tab on the right hand side of your notes. Share with a colleague or with somebody externally through a link just like you do in Nextcloud Files. You can even work together on the note!

Besides, now you have access to activity and versions in Notes directly from the sidebar.

Improved re-connection experience

It can be frustrating when you’re working on a document and have connection issues. Sometimes you’re traveling on a train and lose connection or you take a break from your laptop with a document still open and come back to it having to re-load it. With this release, we’ve made significant improvements to providing you a better re-connection experience. This will allow you to get straight back to work without having to re-load your document with any further delay.

Accessibility improvements

We take accessibility seriously. Our goal is that everyone can enjoy the benefits of Nextcloud! For this release, we worked on much improved support for screen readers. This means more accurate reading of documents and access. Second, new keyboard shortcuts have been added that show up in yellow for easy access. Click on ALT to get hints for navigating though the menu with the keyboard.

For even more updates on new features, bug fixes and improvements, you can check out Collabora’s latest release.

New in Collectives

What’s new in the modern wiki-like knowledge base app Collectives? If you’re an avid user of Collectives, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve made some usability improvements.

Page in full width

Experience your Collectives pages in full width (like a full screen movie for effect!) to comfortably view bulky content like large tables.

Reorganize pages

Do you ever create a new page and find a better spot for it later? You can now move or copy pages to a new location, just like in Nextcloud Files. There’s super simple up and down arrows to reorder your pages just to where you like them.

Recent pages in Dashboard

In your Dashboard, you can add a new widget: Recent Collectives pages. Hop right back to a page you or others were working on in a flash.

Improved rendering of images and other files

• Improved image appearance and quality
• Improved preview and layout for printing

Nextcloud Groupware

Nextcloud Groupware consists of Mail, Calendar and Contacts

Teamwork in Hub is as efficient as ever with the new Groupware features. Those include both platform-wide improvements and app-specific ones.

New in Contacts: Automatic „Busy“ status and shared items

User profiles in contacts now display the items that you share with the contact — owned both by them and by you. Those include files, Calendar events, Talk rooms, and Deck cards. Quickly jump to any item by simply clicking on it.

User status also gets more automation and visibility. From now on, it is visible in the Contacts menu right away instead of the email. Statuses automatically change to “Busy” when a busy calendar event starts. If you have an absence period configured for a certain period of time, your status symbol and text will align with the out-of-office message you added.

Even more powerful Mail

Search in message body

Enable search in the body of Priority inbox emails to find everything you need in your communication history, even if it’s not mentioned in the title. Open Mail settings and tick the corresponding box on the very top to set up the feature. Quick search will include email body results as well as the title results.

This feature is not enabled by default as it sends the search request to your email server – and some can unfortunately be quite slow to respond.

Sorting by date

Need to sort your emails from oldest to newest for quicker access to older correspondence? With the new sorting setting, you can switch between two sorting modes to fine-tune your search results. Find the switch in the Mail settings on the top left of the Mail app interface.

Improved tag management

Edit tag colors to visually categorize emails by your personal preference. Feel safe from accidental clicks: if you attempt to delete a tag, you will see a pop-up letting you know that it will disappear across the whole mailbox.

Smart picker and emoji picker

Create rich emails without leaving the message editor. Now you can use the Smart Picker feature and add emojis to your mails, just like you do in Text. To summon Smart Picker, just type “/” and choose from available options to insert: Talk rooms, Deck cards, Calendar events, GIFs, Files, Collectives pages, and much more. Start typing “:” to add an emoji — add an option from recent emojis or continue typing the full emoji name to find the one you need.

Smarter and brighter Deck

Card images, Completed status, and keyboard shortcuts: working with tasks in Deck becomes muck more intuitive and informative. Besides, we polished the card design to make them more compact and less distractive.

Card cover images

Deck boards have just become richer with cover images! An image will be picked automatically from the first image attached to the card. If there are no images, add one and it will be used as a cover without any need to put it in the description text. Enable cover images in Deck’s display settings on the top right.

“Completed” status

You can also now mark cards as “Completed” to let yourself and others know that the work is done. When there’s a due date set for the card, it will keep you stress-free and your task planning transparent. You can then add the completed cards to archive if you wish to keep your board clean.

Keyboard shortcuts

In Deck, we also introduced keyboard shortcuts to helping you perform quick actions with cards and boards. To use a shortcut for a card, hover your mouse over it. To use board shortcuts, you only need the board page to be active.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud Talk is the best chat and video communication tool that keeps your data yours!

Talk meetings and chats became much more alive and capable. We added many popular features based on user requests: from recording consent and ability to call phone numbers, to screen sharing speaker picture-in-picture and file captions.

Get personal with speaker video feed

Personal connection is always there during the stream with a speaker picture-in-picture present on the screen even when screen sharing. Once your video is on, participants will be able to see you while you are showing your screen or running a slide show.

Recording consent

Nextcloud Talk: Recording consent

Recording consent for a meeting is a nice gesture to your guests’ privacy, but often it is also necessary to comply with your and their company regulations. Now you can request recording consent for your meetings, streams and online events to help everyone feel safe and secure.

Configure it in the conversation settings to apply the rule for all meetings in the current room. Participants will not be able to join the call unless they grant their consent via the pop-up window whether the call is currently being recorded or not. An administrator can export a list of people that consented with the recording from the command line.

Upon starting a call, you can enable the recording right away.

Invite to calls via phone number

Now you can let everybody participate in Talk calls even without a camera, browser or even internet connection. Call one or multiple phone numbers right from the Talk room using Telephone dial-out.

This adds to the existing dial-in feature, where people can dial a specific phone number to join a Talk room.

You remain in full control to save money and keep your meeting organized. You can add users to the room using their mobile numbers, hang up or mute them during the call. The feature can be restricted to selected user groups to keep the costs under control.

The telephone dial-out and dial-in features requires an enterprise SIP setup.

Guest names in meetings

Avoid awkwardness and the struggle to find call participants with custom guest names during large calls and webinars. Talk now asks external users to give a name before joining so everybody in the room knows who is who.

Link to call in notifications

When a meeting including you starts in Talk, you will get a direct call link in the Notifications, so you can join immediately without navigating rooms and buttons. Stress-free communication is what we designed Talk for!

Animated reactions

Animated reactions in video calls adds a little magic to your meetings. React with an emoji from the toolbar and see what happens!

Note to self

The new “Note to self” chat in Talk is your personal safe space in Talk. Use it as a diary or a place to store links and assets, or forward important messages from colleagues to quickly find them later. What’s more, you can add bots, change the avatar and pick a new name, just like in any other Talk room.

File captions

Sharing files in chats is more convenient with file captions. When uploading media, you can write a message describing what it is or what tasks are associated with it. It works the same with text messages — add a file while writing and it will be attached to the message.

New integrations

Nextcloud Hub is a powerful application platform, closely integrating with tons of third party applications and tools. Take a look at what’s new!

Aleph Alpha

• Use this German alternative to OpenAI with Nextcloud Assistant
• Get results with this multi modal large language model (LLM)

Install the app

Memegen

• Easily generate the perfect memes for your chats, emails and documents
• Fill in custom text captions using the Smart Picker functionality

Install the app

New app ecosystem – examples provided!

In our last release, we introduced our new app ecosystem and all the new possibilities to create apps in any programming language of your choice. To take it a step further, in this release we’re providing some example apps to help anyone get started.

Besides everything currently supported in the Open Collaboration Services API, like accessing and sharing files for example, you can now also implement these 3 features in your new app:

Note: we are working on more capabilities and you can suggest more on GitHub.

How to get Hub 7

Get Nextcloud Hub 7

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 7 here!

Get Hub 7

You can download the latest Nextcloud Hub 7 from our install page right now! There you can find a zip file or the all-in-one image for fresh installation.

Over the coming weeks we will make it available to our home users via updater using the usual staged roll-out. If you can’t wait you can switch to the beta channel temporarily. Don’t forget to switch back to stable after you updated to Hub 7!

Note: Your Nextcloud caches the results coming from our updater server, so it can take some time for the new version to show up and you likely have to refresh the page, wait a bit and do that again.

AIO users

For new Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) users, you can install Hub 7 directly by checking the box “Install Nextcloud 28”

For existing AIO users, we have a guide for you! Follow along to set it up today!

The Nextcloud Enterprise version of Hub 7 will become available in about 4 weeks, once the additional testing and certification are complete.

Thank you to our community!

Nextcloud would not be the same without our dedicated, encouraging community. A huge thank you to the thousands of community members for making this release the best it can be and continuing to show your talents and passion for Nextcloud.

Want to help, but aren’t super technical?

You could just give us a review!

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This really helps us, a lot!

The post Nextcloud Hub 7: advanced search and global out-of-office features appeared first on Nextcloud.

Who owns the data at your university?

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.