Massive series of announcements over weekend from Nextcloud conf, event continues

Last Saturday, the Nextcloud Conference kicked off in Berlin! It started with an impressive keynote by Frank Karlitschek making a series of big announcements. Between the weekend program and the Enterprise Day on Monday, some 250 visitors participated in the event, sharing ideas, collaborating on Nextcloud and meeting new friends, colleagues, partners and fellow users. Over 1500 people watched our live stream video of the announcements, and we’re excited with the interest from everybody!

The keynote by Frank drew a full room, plus 1500 viewers online!

6 big announcements

Let’s recap the big announcements from Frank’s keynote! After reminding everyone of the goals and motivations behind Nextcloud and our mission and principles, he announced Nextcloud 17, currently available as release candidate.

We have not yet separated the live stream in shorter videos, but you can start watching from Frank’s keynote on our YouTube channel.

Nextcloud 17

This release delivers an impressive series of improvements with a particular focus in the area of security, scalability and collaboration. A quick overview of the features:

💣 Remote Wipe allows users and administrators to forcibly clean files from remote devices, for example in case they are stolen.
📝 Nextcloud Text, our new distraction-free, collaborative rich text editor
🔒 Improvements to secure view olke enforceable watermarks enable virtual data room use
🔐 Setup two-factor authentication after first login, admins can create one-time login tokens in the web UI and delegate this to group admins
📧 secure mailbox in Outlook Add-in
👥 LDAP write support makes it possible to manage users from Nextcloud
💽 S3 versioning support, IBM Spectrum Scale integration and Global Scale with Collabora Online

You can read the full announcement here.

During his talk, Frank was joined on stage by Nextcloud designer Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Nextcloud security team lead Roeland Douma and IBM Spectrum Scale expert Ulf Troppens to discuss the various improvements that were made. The announcements continued…

Global Scale: millions of users, Collabora Online integration

Nextcloud 17 marks several steps forward for Global Scale, the Nextcloud technology used to support tens to hundreds of millions of users on a single Nextcloud installation. The biggest improvement was covered earlier: Collabora Online integration enables working together even at huge scale.

At registration everyone got a bag with goodies!

IBM Spectrum scale integration, S3 versioning

At large scale, file storage becomes progressively complicated. A collaboration between Nextcloud and IBM has made the leading large scale file storage and leading content collaboration platform a perfect match for storing, sharing and working with large volumes of data. Thanks to IBM Spectrum Scale integration, users can expect a consistent file system view, even at the massive scale supported by Spectrum Scale. Read more about this here.

Nextcloud 17 also introduces support for S3 versioning, improving the integration with popular object storage solutions like OpenStack and Amazon AWS.

Doubling of security bug bounties to USD 10.000

Just before the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin, Nextcloud GmbH has decided to double the security bug bounty, going up to USD 10.000 for a remote execution vulnerability! This was discussed by Nextcloud Security team lead Roeland Douma. Read more in our blog post.

Virtual data room

With Nextcloud 17, Nextcloud releases a product designed for handling extremely sensitive data. Nextcloud VDR is designed for situations like due diligence for an investment, deciding on a loan or other sensitive business transactions.

Read the full announcement blog here.

Client updates

After the big Nextcloud 17 and related announcements, Frank discussed the improvements to the Nextcloud clients, and announced no less than three releases:

• Nextcloud Android client 3.8 with U2F, TLS 1.3, Remote Wipe and more
• Nextcloud iOS client release introduces new share view, dark mode, better performance
• Nextcloud Desktop client 2.6.0 with new Login Flow, second test version of Virtual Drive

During the break, people hung out in the lounge.

Nextcloud Flow makes it easy to automate actions and workflows

After covering the clients, Frank turned towards a feature preview for the next release!

Nextcloud 18 will introduce Flow, which will make it easy for users to automate some common tasks through an easy, graphical user interface. Integration with the wide variety of apps in the Nextcloud ecosystem will be an important priority for this project. Learn more about Flow.

Developer program

The keynote ended with a focus on the audience, introducing the new Nextcloud developer program.

Nextcloud was always designed as a software platform and not a monolithic application. This is why we have the apps concept, many of the APIs and why we push open standards. In the past, many developers and companies used these capabilities. At the conference, we launched the new Nextcloud developer program: work with us!

That was just the start

After the keynote, the program continued with many talks about privacy-invasion, security threats, a panel on Public Money, Public Code, and dozens more subjects covered in the lightning talks. Talks which represent the values we support and believe in (open source, diversity, digital rights, decentralization, security, privacy) as well as technical and just plain interesting subjects were covered in many ways.

In line for food during the lunch break

Eating and hanging out in the lounge

Conversations and food go together well

It is too much to summarize and we’ll therefore simply point you again to the video on Youtube! We will get the separated videos out in the coming weeks and we’ll keep you up to date.

Saturday night we visited a beergarden for food, drinks and conversation

The second day

The second day kicked off by a keynote from Renata Avila. She made the point that people are having their rights taken away from them and we think we can fix it with webcam blocking stickers. We should be more outraged and need to fight this! Inaction is being complicit.

Following her inspiring talk, more sessions covered robots and the value of open hardware, the need for activism for privacy and we had a panel on diversity in open source.

You can watch the live stream video below, we’ll put split up videos live the coming weeks!

The booth area was well visited

During the lunch breaks, a lounge room was set up with some bean bags, providing a chance to talk, code or – well, take a nap… Meanwhile, outside the conference room, a series of booths was set up where friends of the project demonstrated a variety of products, devices or invited people to learn more about Free and Open Source Software. Among others, we were joined by:

• openSUSE
• Nitrokey
• FSFE
• Univention
• GNOME
• Turris Omnia
• DAVX5
• ONLYOFFICE

Our friends from Tuxedo computers send us 3 laptops on loan, which were used at the registration and as speaker laptops! We’re real happy with the support and friendship of these projects and, of course, in particular thank those who sponsored us – Univention, openSUSE, Nitrokey, Turris Omnia and Tuxedo Computers. Of course, also present were Collabora and Assanti, makers of our Outlook Add-in, who together with Nitrokey, Turris, ONLYOFFICE and Univention were also with a booth at our Enterprise Day on Monday.

Our awesome volunteers on stage during the closing sessions

Enterprise Day

Monday, about 85 Nextcloud customers and partners met at the Park Inn hotel at Alexanderplatz for a day of in-depth sessions around security, Global Scale, the Nextcloud app ecosystem and several case studies from customers like BOELL, RENATER and the University of Nantes.

Enterprise day opening session

Enterprise day break

We are not yet done!

Our intensive coding sessions are still happening at the TU Berlin! If you’re in Berlin you can still visit us at room MA141.

For you who missed the Nextcloud Conference this year and really wanted to attend but couldn’t, soon we will make available the split out talks in youtube. If you can’t watch, grab the stream for day one here and find day 2 here. An advice? Don’t miss the next Nextcloud conf!!