Joas Schilling to talk about notifications in Nextcloud

Joas Schilling is a Software Engineer who has been involved in open source for over a decade. He is a a core member of the phpBB developer team and has been working on ownCloud code since late 2013. He graduated from the University of Stuttgart and developed the Notifications and Activities technology in Nextcloud. Schilling will be delivering a talk at the upcoming Nextcloud Conference in Berlin.

Who should be attending your session and why?
Server app developers and client developers, so they can see what we can do to make Nextcloud more integrated into people’s work flows.
When you talk about notifications in Nextcloud, what are we actually talking about? Aren’t notifications client dependent? I mean the app can have its own notifications mechanism vs desktop client and web interface? Can you please elaborate?
We have an API which provides notifications for various things (all provided by the various apps):

• incoming shares
• announcements from the administrators
• user was mentioned in a comment
• …

All these should come to the attention of the users sooner rather than later. For this we implemented the notifications in the desktop client a while ago. With the next releases of the mobile clients they will follow (including push notifications), bringing yet more power to notifications.

Notifications are extremely important yet often overlooked features, how important are notifications for NC?
See above, we are strengthening the notifications system more with the mobile clients. When they finally reach the users through all channels, they can be used even more.

How mature are notifications in NC?
Notifications are quite well implemented on the server side. Clients are currently not done. They need a bit more work, but that is already in the pipeline.

Is the notifications work fully in-house or you take contributions also?
As you can see on the examples above, each Nextcloud app can create notifications. We just built the eco-system, now it needs to grow to it’s potential 😉