Opportunities and risks around AI

As Margrethe Vestager aptly remarked, “With artificial intelligence, trust is a must, not a nice-to-have.” The evaluation of AI should focus not only on its technology but also on its societal and environmental benefits.

The public sector across the EU faces questions around AI with regard to digital sovereignty and data leaks. The latest technologies enable AI’s to access troves of documents and then answer questions from them or generate content out of them. These functions would allow great advances in the speed of handling bureaucratic processes, but current solutions require large swaths of data to be handed over to third-party AI providers. This creates unacceptable risks for the digital sovereignty and security of government data. A digitally sovereign AI is needed.

AI strategy and Nextcloud at Schleswig-Holstein

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has made a strategic bet on Nextcloud’s on-premises content collaboration platform as part of its focus on digital sovereignty. The latest developments by Nextcloud in the area of ethical AI align strongly with the state’s commitment to digitization of its services. As one of the most innovative states in Germany, it is aiming to dramatically accelerate its bureaucratic processes so that, for example, the approval process for wind turbines or other economic developments can move forward much faster.

In the future, we will make AI services available to colleagues in the state administration directly at the workplace. We want to drive the development of digitally sovereign and open solutions in addition to the use of existing AI services such as ChatGPT. Because, the administration of the future will work in an automated, algortihmized, cloudified and data-based way. To make this vision of the future a reality, we must provide the appropriate tools. This also creates value and jobs in our domestic digital economy.

Minister of Digitisation and Head of the State Chancellery Dirk Schrödter

The plans: digitally sovereign AI

As the Minister points out, AI systems like ChatGPT are already integrated in Nextcloud and used at the state. For some limited use cases, these can be useful.

But Nextcloud has also integrated several open source large language models that can be run locally. These were released as part of Hub 6 last weekend, providing an integrated, private AI Assistant that can summarize, translate, or reword texts, summarize email threads, transcribe video calls, create project plans and so on. Hundreds of organizations in the private and public sectors are expected to deploy these in the coming months.

The next step for Nextcloud will be to develop large language models that can help in specific domains. This way, the Nextcloud AI Assistant will be able to help write specific government documents, answer questions about state processes, and so on, in the style and language used in the government.

Based on Nextcloud Hub, the State Chancellery will expand its current approach to providing artificial intelligence-based services at the workplace. Embedded in the state government’s AI strategy, Nextcloud and the State Chancellery will create a generative language model for the state administration that is adapted to the specifics of administrative texts. For this purpose, the state of Schleswig-Holstein will make anonymized training data available. The model will be available as Open Source.

Schleswig-Holstein and Nextcloud recognize that Europe needs reliable AI technology that protects Europe’s economic and digital sovereignty. Our strategic initiative will lead to the first digitally sovereign AI that can deliver insights based on sensitive government data, without the risk of third-party access.

Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of Nextcloud

The future

The use of AI in the public sector comes with strict privacy, security, and digital sovereignty requirements. Together with Schleswig-Holstein, Nextcloud will develop local, private, digitally sovereign AI technology that can deliver on these needs, 100% open source and able to run locally.

The post German state & Nextcloud build digitally sovereign AI for public sector appeared first on Nextcloud.

We’ve encountered a problem with the automatic updater and decided to do a quick update with fixes. While at it, the latest Hub 6 (27.1) also got a minor update.

If you got stuck on an update, you will notice it complains about some unexpected files:

The following extra files have been found:
    package-lock.json
    composer.lock
    package.json
    composer.json

When you delete these files, and resume the upgrade, things will continue just fine. The updates from today also resolve the issue. If you are already on 26.0.6 or 25.0.11, best remove these files before the next update and then move to 26.0.7 or 25.0.12.

You can find the full changelog of fixes and improvements for these releases on our website. As said, the changes are minor for most releases, with things like hiding shares by disabled users, some minor caldav fixes, correct reporting of the size of encrypted files and a fix for loading comments being added to all 3 releases. Note that Hub 4 (25.x) will get only 1 more update, after which we strongly recommend you update to Hub 5 or move to Nextcloud Enterprise for up to 5 years of updates.

Desktop client 3.10

The Desktop Client team last week made 3.10 available, together with the release of Nextcloud Hub 6. This is a major release with a ton improvements. The biggest is that, in addition to locking files that are being edited on the server, the client can now also detect files being opened locally in Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, and lock the files on the server (and other clients). This can help avoid conflicts between multiple users editing the same file.

Here is a list of other, smaller improvements:

• Files that are deleted on the server can now optionally go to the trash on the client. This was available for Linux but now also on Windows and MacOS.
• There is now a warning when a new folder goes over the folder size limit, so you can choose to stop syncing it.
• Sync issues are now always on top of the activity list, so conflicts for example can be resolved even easier.
• Share dialog now has ‘allow resharing’ option and suggests a password when passwords are set as mandatory on the server
• File locking works better with virtual files
• Improved migration from ownCloud to Nextcloud

A lot of other improvements to network and conflict handling, dealing with notifications, end-to-end encryption and bulk upload have been made as well. Support for uploading multi-part chunks to S3 will make the use of object storage much faster, especially with large files, but only when S3 is used as primary storage.

You can find the full changelog here.

Note: There will be no more releases of Nextcloud Hub 2 (24.x.x and older). Upgrade to Nextcloud Enterprise to continue to get security and stability updates or move to Nextcloud Hub 3 or Hub 4. Don’t forget that running web-facing software without regular updates is risky. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed.

Note²: PHP 7.x is no longer officially supported by the PHP community. Nextcloud has supported PHP 8.0 and newer versions for some time now, and we strongly recommend you move to a newer version of PHP. Version 8.0 is already out of active support (!) and has only a few weeks of security updates left. Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x) deprecates PHP 7.4 but still works with it. Still we recommend you use PHP 8.1 or newer. Hub 4 and newer support PHP 8.2.

Ready to move to Nextcloud Hub 6?

Nextcloud Hub 5 was released just this weekend and we recommend that you check it out to see if you can benefit from its latest features. A quick summary:

100% local, private AI assistant that can summarize your mail threads and help you write, translate, dictate and more
Show speaking time, 1 hour call warning for a healty meeting culture
File, chat & mail reminders so you don’t always have to JUMP immediately on what’s new
Bots in Talk to help you summarize meetings and bring content from other tools in Talk
New file selector to make navigating your files easier, and updated share flow to simplify sharing
NEW: developers can now write apps in ANY language, not just PHP!
Much, much more!

Check out the full release announcement here.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are generally painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as a system administrator.

The post Maintenance releases for Hub 4, 5 and 6 appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud is on an international tour spreading the word of Nextcloud Hub 6 this October! Go to any of the following events to:

• Discover Nextcloud’s AI features and apps that are ethical, open-source and integrated throughout our platform
• Be inspired by our integrated single platform with file storage, a full office suite, chat and video conferencing, group collaboration possibilities and more
• Understand how Nextcloud can scale for big companies with thousands of users
• See firsthand how Nextcloud provides you 100% control over your data

Whether you’re in Germany, Italy, Latvia, Singapore or the UAE, we’re ready to share the latest of what Nextcloud has to offer nearest you.

Open Source Week (OSW23)

Oct. 3-5 – Rome, Italy

Join us for the 4th annual Open Source Week in Rome! This exhibition will host talks on new trends including how open source can connect with artificial intelligence.

If you are eager to discover how Nextcloud Hub can be leveraged as the most secure solution in Italy for your collaboration needs, feel free to visit us.

Riga Comm

Oct. 5-6 – Riga, Latvia

Riga Comm is a business technology fair and conference in Riga, Latvia. Topics like fintech, e-commerce, machine learning and more will be discussed, making it the perfect environment for entrepreneurs, business executives and state institutions to attend.

We will have a booth where you can learn about all the many benefits, uses and integrated tools in Nextcloud Hub – the best open source, on-premises Content Collaboration Platform.

It-sa

Oct. 10-12 – Nuremberg, Germany

Attending it-sa is a unique opportunity to explore all Nextcloud has to offer. Through live demos and face to face discussions with our sales and engineering experts, you’ll discover firsthand all the possibilities with a single collaboration platform. Speak with the Nextcloud team about all your inquiries, questions and sift through how Nextcloud can be catered to your organization’s needs and requirements.

CloudExpo Asia

Oct. 11 & 12 – Marina Bay Sands, Singapore

Meet the Nextcloud team at the 9th annual Cloud Expo Asia – one of the best-attended technology events in all of Asia.

This is the place to be to get amazing demos of Nextcloud Hub fit for Asian regions, businesses and organizations. Whatever your needs, we’ll customize to fit your organization to reach more customers, foster a more productive and healthy workplace and most of all, keep your data secure and on your own premises.

We invite you to come see for yourself!

GITEX Global

Oct. 16-20 – Dubai, UAE

Ready to embark on a journey to Dubai for all the latest trends and technological advances on a global scale?

Experience one of the most influential events in tech and meet our team! Start a conversation with one of our seasoned sales managers or data engineers to learn about Nextcloud Hub and the power of data localization and data sovereignty.

You don’t want to miss this fantastic event that will surely leave you wanting more.

KOMMUNALE trade fair and congress

Oct. 18 & 19 – Nuremberg, Germany

Join Germany’s largest trade fair for municipal supplies and the established meeting point for decision-makers and experts from cities and municipalities.

If you’re a city or municipality in Germany, this is an excellent opportunity to see how your data can be stored on your own server so it’s in your control. With Nextcloud, your data is the most secure it can be while also providing a fully integrated Hub with chat, email, contacts and much more.

Don’t miss getting a tailored demo at this event!

The post Nextcloud’s exhibiting at international events in October 2023 appeared first on Nextcloud.

Just like that, the Nextcloud Conference has come to a close. It’s been an exciting weekend and we can’t wait to share it with you!

Today was the second and final day of the conference and we hope it was a great experience for all who attended. If you missed it, sit back and relax for an overview of day 2 with all the highlights from our 2 keynote speakers, 14 lightning talks, 3 panelists and much more.

Katrin Fritsch morning keynote: A just and green internet for all

To kick off the 2nd day of the Nextcloud Conference, we welcomed Katrin Fritsch to the stage. Katrin is a tech and climate researcher and consultant who advocates for an open internet that’s sustainable yet embraces human creativity.

In her talk, she examined the increasing amount of CO2 emissions that come from worldwide Internet usage and what that means for us today. In order to counteract this, she brought up the Consumption, Intensity and Direction model: Consumption – reduce how much tech we use; Intensity- make tech in a less harmful way and; Direction worldview is accelerating. We need to start asking ourselves questions about which direction we want to take in the future, as efficiency ultimately impacts usage and thus affects the climate.

She also described the Internet today as becoming a brittle monoculture, fit of just seven companies that dominate the industry. She exclaimed the need for people to first focus on changing this dynamic of power.

Katrin encouraged the audience to check out thegreenwebfoundation.org to learn more.

A morning of Lightning Talks!

The morning of Day 2, we had a whopping 14 Lightning Talks!

These 5 minute talks are speedy yet insightful bursts of information on a wide range of topics. From getting inspired by Robert Mizen’s talk about FOSS and the future to Kate Döen’s talk on using OpenAPI for API documentation, there was lots to learn this year.

Keynote with Simon Phipps

It was such a privilege to have Simon Phipps speak at the Nextcloud Conference this year. His wealth of knowledge in open source and experience as a consultant to companies and governments including the European Commission make him an excellent advocate and inspiration to us all.

In his talk, Simon discusses the emerging Fourth Sector. Being involved in the Open Source Initiative (OCS) as its president for the last 15 years has helped in his awareness of the Fourth Sector as it pertains to the direction and future of this piece of society.

Learn more about Simon and a more detailed explanation on his opinion of the Fourth Sector here.

Panel session: How to contribute?

Do you want to get involved in open source but don’t know where to start? Take the advice from our panelists: Marcel Scherello – Sales Engineer at Nextcloud, James Sunquist – avid Nextcloud contributor and Nimisha Vijay – UX Designer at Nextcloud. This afternoon, they engaged in an insightful discussion based on their own contribution journey’s.

All our panelists got involved with open source and Nextcloud in different ways, but what remains the same is that it all started with a personal need. For instance, Marcel was looking for an audio system for his children that worked for their family. James needed a way to stay in touch with his family who is living far away, and open source opened doors for them. Overall, they recommend to ask yourself what you need, or what others around you need, and just get started. You can’t get involved without just pressing go, so whatever passions you may have, then bring them to the open source world.

That’s a wrap!

We’d like to thank all our speakers and participants who joined us at this event and made it the success that it was.

Our conference was live all day Saturday and Sunday, and now you can skip to any part you’d like to see on video.

The post Day 2 Recap of the 2023 Nextcloud Conference appeared first on Nextcloud.

After a full day of keynotes, talks and discussions, Day 1 of the Nextcloud Conference is complete! Thank you to everyone who made it here from near or far and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow for Day 2!

If you missed it or want a recap, read on!

The motto of the 2023 Nextcloud Conference is “Trust, Transparency, Together.” With the increasing demands of today’s collaboration platforms, transparency becomes an essential aspect for how these platforms handle and communicate data processes to both users and developers. Nextcloud firmly believes that trust and transparency will form the cornerstone of collaboration platforms moving forward, nurturing a reliable and secure digital environment.

Nextcloud Hub 6 announcement

To kick off this year’s conference, the Nextcloud team announced the brand new Nextcloud Hub 6 release! For the first time, Nextclouders introduced the Nextcloud Assistant, distraction-free features and other new tools to prioritize a healthy work culture.

Thanks to the Nextcloud team for the awesome announcement of Hub 6 and our healthy meeting and work culture along will all the new improvements in Nextcloud Files, Talk, Office, Groupware and more!

Max Schrems Keynote: The EU-US dynamic on data privacy today

For our first keynote, Max Schrems hit the stage. As an Austrian lawyer with expertise on EU and US data privacy law, he took the audience through the intricacies of the new data privacy framework. With his experience fighting against previous data privacy laws in the European Court of Justice, the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework, he brought valuable insight about what actually goes on behind the scenes.

Panel session Trust, Transparency, Together

Following the keynote, Max was joined on stage by Katrin Fritsch, tech & climate researcher & consultant and Daphne Muller, Manager of Ecosystems & Alliances at Nextcloud as well as a privacy researcher.

Nextcloud Marketing Manager of North America, Brent Gervais started the talk with what “Trust, Transparency, Together” meant for each panelist in their area of expertise. For instance, Katrin Fritsch aligned “transparency” with the climate crisis and how government and companies are handling the CO2 emissions produced from machines creating AI.

Lightning Talks

Today, we had 9 Lightning Talks – our special 5 minute talks – from Nextclouders, developers and contributors about a variety of topics.

High performing Nextcloud apps

For instance, Varun Patil talked about his experience building high performing Nextcloud apps like his app Memories, a community maintained photo manager for Nextcloud.

UX design process

In another lightning talk by Clementine, UX Designer at Arawa, a Nextcloud partner, she talked about the benefits of usability testing.

Thanks for a great day!

Thanks for joining us! Now, it’s time to mingle and chat with other attendees, speakers, partners and Nextcloud employees with a pizza party at our venue.

Missed today’s livestream or couldn’t be present in-person in Berlin? We’ve got you covered!

Tomorrow stay tuned for the second and final day of #NextcloudConf . Check out the program to know what to expect.

The post Trust, Transparency, Together: Highlights from Day 1 of the Nextcloud Conference appeared first on Nextcloud.

Our latest release supports a healthy meeting culture, introduces the Nextcloud Assistant and emphasizes user-centric design, transparency and user control.

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.

To the millions of home users and the tens of thousands of companies, government entities, public organizations, schools and universities that have used Nextcloud to regain control over their data, thank you for trusting us as your digital workspace and collaboration platform. We hope you enjoy all this new release has to offer.

Build a healthy meeting culture with Nextcloud

An enormous part of our work life remains online today making it important to foster a healthy environment around it. Over are the days where the primary focus is supercharging productivity. What matters now is you and your well-being. Nextcloud has honed in on what makes a healthy online culture – from meetings to file storage. This release brings you accessible, helpful and powerful tools that allow your work life to be less stressful, cluttered and overwhelming in Nextcloud Hub.

With Nextcloud Hub 6, there are countless ways to support your mental health and keep a healthy work-life balance. Read on to hear what we did in Hub 6 to help you be more productive in a sustainable way!

Start fresh every day

When you start your day with Nextcloud, you first open your dashboard. It’s filled with all the highlights you need: see who’s messaged you, the files you recently worked on and important emails, allowing you to jump right back in.

Remind me… later please!

An important aspect of a healthy work life is eliminating distractions to avoid feeling overwhelmed. To help with this, we introduced a “remind me” feature in a few places:

Talking time collected

Do you have a colleague that takes over the whole call, leaving no one else the chance to speak? Our new talking time feature shows how long participants speak during a call. We enabled this so people can be conscious of their own talking time, while giving others the opportunity to speak more in calls. We hope this little piece of social engineering makes a difference in your next call!

60-minute call popup

That’s a wrap! Nextcloud Talk now provides a warning message once your meeting reaches 1 hour. In an effort to avoid endless meetings and have a cap on your calls, this feature may be particularly helpful in using your time more efficiently.

Less switching.. use the Smart Picker

When you need a piece of information or data, you often have to switch to another app or website. This not only takes time, but also energy. We have a solution: the Smart Picker lets you pull in information from various sources while staying in the app you’re working.

For example, if you’re in a call and want to remember a new task you’ve just been given, you can use the Smart Picker to create a new Deck card for you – right in the chat! You avoid switching to another app – in this case Deck – and remain focused in your current context. Or, you remember a nice YouTube video you want to share – use the Smart Picker! Share a ticket, link to a file or a chat room – we got you covered.

There introduce some new Smart Pickers in Hub 6, like the super cool Sketch Picker which lets you draw on an image or blank canvas. There are a few more new Smart Pickers – read on to find out which ones!

Notifications minimized

Notifications can really pull you out of focus. To be mindful about the attention of others, you can send a chat message ‘silently’ without causing notifications to others in a room, and you can even silently start a call which doesn’t ring everyone’s phone! Also, you can:

• Set your status to Do-Not-Disturb mode. For example, you could put your status to “out for lunch” if you’re away from your desk. If you’re in a call, Nextcloud automatically updates your status so colleagues see you are busy.
• Set your working hours and enable Do-Not-Disturb mode. This means you won’t get notifications while someone is active in a Talk conversation outside your preferred working hours or time zone.
• Gifs are cool, but can be distracting. Hide gifs sent in a Talk chat message to create a clearer space.

Efficiency administered

Making life easier, saving you time – much of Nextcloud is designed to do that.

• Click on someone’s avatar anywhere in Nextcloud – even in Files or Deck – to start a chat, send a mail and more.

• Book a meeting with someone from their profile – you don’t even need to open Calendar.
• Instead of asking your whole team a question in a chat, you could speed up the process (and limit extra notifications) by just starting a quick poll!

• See when someone’s typing in a chat and a read status – to know a colleague is engaged or not as to avoid extra explanations.
• If the conversation has too many people you can use break-out rooms to split up in smaller groups.

Benefits of a Single Platform:

Seamless integration

Create a task or calendar item from an email

More

Create a task or Deck card in a chat

Hundreds more!

AI in Nextcloud Hub 6

Artificial Intelligence is still quite ‘hot’. There’s hype, but also substance – there are a ton of ways in which AI features can help you get work done faster and easier. Nextcloud comes with tons of smaller and larger AI features, from a smart Mail inbox that shows you only relevant emails, to face recognition so you can find photos of a person across your entire collection.

But, AI also has issues. From its carbon footprint and issues with bias to data leaks and more existential risks, we totally get it when the term ‘AI’ doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy!

For that reason, our approach to AI is built on flexibility, choice and especially transparency. Nextcloud Hub is the only self-hosted Content Collaboration Platform to provide AI features in an ethical and secure way!

Want to learn more about what options we provide, how to install a feature or find its rating? We have an earlier blog covering just that!

Introducing the Nextcloud Assistant

Tons of companies are introducing text generation features courtesy of “large language models”. Typically, they just send your data to OpenAI or another big tech firm. We did offer a similar integration, but you know that’s not our way. So, we made a promise. We said we’d work on providing you these abilities, WITHOUT data leaks. And, today, just 3 months later, we deliver.

And, as always, we didn’t just replace the feature we had, but we did one better!

The on-premise Nextcloud AI Assistant is here! You can now call upon your Nextcloud Assistant at anytime, anywhere to assist you with your tasks. And, because we believe this can be so helpful, we integrated it in a very powerful way in Nextcloud.

As a start, you have the Assistant everywhere, with the icon in the top-right, as you can see in the animation above.

Next, we integrated the Assistant specifically in a few places where it would be super helpful.

Your Assistant with Text

First, we integrated the Assistant in Nextcloud Text. Select some pagragraphs and have the Assistant summarize, generate a headline, re-word or translate it! Just click on the star icon on the right for a pop-up with all the options to get the results you want.

Assistant in Mail

Do you have email threads that are way too long? We often find ourselves scrolling through them to find what someone said or refer back to something. With Nextcloud Assistant, you can now have your email thread summarized for you!

Of course you can also have text generated for you in Mail too, so you don’t need to come up with every subject line and content to send out.

And with all these, your AI can run locally meaning users can access the full power of large language models without having to worry about data leaks.

Assistant in Talk

Last but not least, the Nextcloud Assistant is coming to Talk! You’ll be able to ask it questions during your conversation(s), getting suggestions on content, headlines and more in a super easy way. This Talk bot should be available a few weeks from now.

100% on your server, without any leaks

The Nextcloud Assistant is the only integrated AI assistant in any collaboration platform that won’t leak data or use your activities to train a new AI. If you work at a company and are worried your competitor might find out about your new strategies and plans because the Zoom call you did was used to train an AI – this can’t happen with Nextcloud.

Keeping your data yours is in our DNA, and we’re definitely proud of this industry-first!

Nextcloud Files

Nextcloud Files is the premier file sync & share solution

Selecting files

Given Nextcloud Hub is a single platform that combines Talk, Office and Groupware functions in one interface, having everything you need all in one place makes it easy to achieve a cohesive workflow. Our new File Picker Selection Dialogue is the perfect example – in a chat, document or email you can easily select a file to share, insert, attach or link! The new file selection dialog has a quick filter on top, remembers your last sorting method, shows you recent files and favorites and is overall super easy to navigate.

In chat

In a chat, select ‘share from Nextcloud’ and a pop-up will appear with all your files. Easily share a file you’ve recently worked on or one you’ve favorited. The new dialog remembers sort order and the last file location making it so much more convenient to use.

Advanced file versioning

We’re constantly making edits to our documents and the more the edits, the more versions there are. Now, it’s easy to see older versions without having to download them: just click them and they load immediately. Even better, we made it possible to compare two versions with side-by side viewing. Notice the changes made in a snap, rename the version and don’t lose track of your file’s history again.

Simpler sharing

We always get a ton of feedback on Nextcloud. We got input from the millions of users at Magentacloud about our sharing dialog, and worked on improving the flow.

Now when you want to share a file, you enter the recipient’s name or email. Then, you set settings like a password and expiration date, or the note to the recipient – before you finally hit the share.

We also simplified the flow of sharing a public link. You can now set multiple options without having to re-open the menu.

Nextcloud Talk

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

Play Talk video

Nextcloud’s video conferencing and chat platform is bringing some snazzy new features to the table! Inspired by on our goal of helping you maintain a healthy meeting culture, many of these features help to reduce work stress and create a more positive virtual environment. We already mentioned the 1-hour call pop-up and the speaking time features, to help keep meetings in check. What else does Nextcloud Talk offer you in this release?

Group system message

If you’re hosting or are part of a call with many participants, you’re used to seeing everyone’s name pop up one after the other stating that they joined the call. To reduce the flow of messages so you can focus on what matters, the call will now only state a few names and the rest as “others joined the call.” It’s sometimes the small things that make our time online stress-free and simplistic.

Conversation filters

Too many chats open? In your chat bar on the left, you’ll see a new filter icon. Here, you can filter unread mentions – when you’re tagged in a chat – or any unread messages that you haven’t gotten to yet. This helpful feature acts as a reminder to get back to someone that needs your assistance, without you needing to remember.

Text formatting in chats

Want your chat conversation to be more structured and organized? It’s now possible to use basic formatting in chat. Using markdown, try out **bold**, *italics*, –strike-through-, # headings, * bullet lists, “`code“` and more!

Task bot

During a conversation, you may want to write down a note or future task for a teammate. It’s now super simple: just type the note or future task in the chat with ‘todo’ or ‘task’ in front and at the end of the call they’ll all be summarized for you in a bullet list. Talk about working efficiency!

Find open conversations

If you haven’t joined a chat, you won’t see it. That’s why we’ve now created a search bar for you to find any available, open chat room easily. You can find the search bar in the left sidebar of Talk. This behavior keeps your interface clean of unneeded distractions that may be unimportant to your current work.

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

With this release, we’ve got tons of improvements and new features for all corners of your office. Read on to learn about them!

What’s new in Nextcloud Tables?

Nextcloud Tables helps businesses and organizations manage their structured data. With Tables, you can manage your employees’ time off, customer data, health tracking and much more.

We developed Tables in response to requests from customers, especially in the Government sector, who were not happy that some prominent tech companies offering similar functionality are forcing their customers to the cloud. Many governments take digital sovereignty serious, and being completely dependent on the whims of some foreign cloud firm is of course not acceptable.

In this release, we’ve made key improvements to make it an even more powerful tool.

• Selective viewing and filtering – Finally, Tables introduces a very powerful feature: views. You can create any number of views on a table, and share them with different people or groups with different access permissions. This way, for example, the employees can enter a vacation request and only see their own requests and their status, the manager can only see and approve requests from members of their team and HR has a full overview of all vacations.

• Employee – Requests vacation
• Manager – Reviews/Approves vacation
• HR personnel – Tracks vacation

The advanced filters make it possible for employees to only see the status of their own vacation request, while the HR manager has access to everything. That way, the information in the Table stays confidential while simultaneously having one space to manage all the separate processes.

Watch the video below to see these new features in action!

• Share a view with the Smart Picker – With the Smart Picker, you can now can insert an interactive table or a view of a table in a document.

• Link column type – From within Tables, it is also now possible to search for and link to any type of content supported in Nextcloud search. This list goes on – chat rooms and messages, calendars and calendar items, YouTube videos, GitHub tickets, locations, and much more.

New in Collectives

Collectives is a convenient place to store and manage knowledge. It’s the knowledge base for your business where all the important information and know-how is. The new features include:

New landing pages!

For each new Collective you make, there will be a dedicated landing page for it. See pages you’ve recently worked on to jump right back to where you left off. See who’s part of the Collective, and more!

Easier to manage members

A pop-up now appears when you want to add, view or remove members in your Collective

Restore pages again!

Phew! If you accidentally delete a page you’ve been working on for hours, you can easily restore it

Create diagrams with Mermaid

Nextcloud now has powerful support for creating diagrams with a text-based syntax called Mermaid. In Nextcloud Text – which is the primary text support for Nextcloud Office, Deck, Collectives and some other apps – can now use Mermaid to produce simple, visually appealing and helpful diagrams with code!

There’s no better way to share an idea or workflow than in visual form with easily identifiable shapes, lines and text boxes.

Add-ons to the Smart Picker

Earlier this year, we introduced the Smart Picker – a tool to quickly insert content into a chat, document, task or email. New Smart Picker integrations regularly appear in our App Store and we wanted to highlight a few additions:

Draw a sketch! – Can’t put it into words? Sketch it out instead! In a Nextcloud Talk chat, activate the Smart Picker with a slash (/) to get started. Also available in Office, Deck, Notes, Collectives.

Nextcloud Groupware

Nextcloud Groupware consists of Mail, Calendar and Contacts

Play Groupware video

Calendar

For instance, in Calendar, we’ve improved the one-step process to set up a remote meeting. As you can watch in the video, simply create a meeting in Calendar and click ‘create a Talk room.’ Not only does this automatically create a Talk room with the same name from the Calendar meeting! We now also set the description, and the link to the Talk room will be in the Location and clickable in your Calendar. We also add the participants to the Talk room, so when the meeting starts, they will get a notification – if they hadn’t seen it from their calendar. In just one motion, you’ve created a Calendar event, invited the team and organized and set up a meeting location.

Simple and stress-free!

Mail

In Mail, we bring you more automation so you don’t have to think about the small things. For example, spam mail will be marked automatically and moved to the spam folder, so you don’t get distracted by junk mail. Also, old mail that you’ve already thrown away in the trash will be auto-deleted. Just set up how many days you’d prefer so unwanted mail will be out of sight and out of mind. It’s also easy to forget about your running storage quota, so we now offer a quota depletion warning so you can take care of it on time.

Deck

Are you ever in a meeting and need to note down a new task for later? With the new Deck Card Picker, you can create a new Deck card directly in Talk without ever leaving your conversation. Just type a slash (/) in the chat box to activate the Deck Card Picker and you’ll be able to make your card – and even select the board or list it’s in. This new feature is an excellent example of how Nextcloud as a single, integrated platform can make your work life so much more efficient.

The Deck Card Picker works in Talk, Office, Notes and more so wherever you are in Nextcloud, you can create tasks and get them done faster. See the video below how the Deck Card Picker works in Nextcloud Talk!

For Developers: build apps in your favorite language!

We are happy to announce that all core apps are now fully documented with OpenAPI by OCS (Open Collaboration Services). With OCS, apps and integrations can be developed in other languages and are super stable. A great benefit of OpenAPI is that it can help you automatically generate code to help integrate the API into applications.

To make it even easier, we introduced the OCS Viewer app. With this app you can, in a super intuitive way, browse our API, try out a request with various parameters, and see the result or grab pieces of code that can request certain data or perform various operations against a Nextcloud server. For example, upload files, view a folder listing, create or modify a share, and so on. Just copy-paste in your app, whether you write in Python, Go or OCaml.

If you develop a server app and want YOUR app API to also be nicely documented through OpenAPI, we have good news: there’s a tutorial on our developer site now!

We also write 4 other, new tutorials, with tons of more advanced app development information, tips on debugging issues and much more.

We very much look forward to the apps you’ll built!

But, there is more. Something much BIGGER!

No more “just PHP”!

For a long time, PHP has been the only language you can use to have direct access to the Nextcloud code and develop apps. While PHP certainly scales well, it isn’t for everyone. Everybody has their favorite language, and we thought it was time to bring you some good news: In Hub 6, we are excited to announce that developers can now write server apps in other languages other than PHP!

Yes, that means you can use pretty much any programming language you like! To kickstart development, we’ve built a Python library and two example apps using Python. But you can use any language you like, of course!

These new apps will be independent from the Nextcloud core, by interacting with the Nextcloud through the Open Collaboration Services API. This brings 4 benefits:

• Having a clear separation between apps and the Nextcloud core clients avoids any issues in the core of Nextcloud. For example, if there’s a bug in a new app, it won’t cause any damage to the rest of Nextcloud.
• As we maintain these API’s independently, we can commit to keeping them stable for many, many years!
• It’s also easier to distribute compute. For example, you could create a separate node in the server network that runs Nextcloud with special hardware for heavy AI operations.
• Lastly, we have control over what data apps have access to, ensuring the utmost security.

With this new ecosystem, we hope it makes developing for Nextcloud more accessible for everyone and empowers user choice. Whichever programming language you prefer, whether it be for accessibility, stability or security reasons, we hope this opens major doors for you and your future contributions to Nextcloud!

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!

Pexip

• Manage and access Pexip calls from within Talk, Calendar, Mail and more
• Activate with the Smart Picker to use anytime

Install the app

Slack

• Share Nextcloud Files directly to a Slack chat room
• Keep your files safe by storing them in Nextcloud and conveniently sharing to Slack

Install the app

The bots are coming!

Bots are an excellent way to connect various services and make life easier. They can take information from a monitoring service, an issue tracker or other applications and allow users to interact in chat. In Nextcloud Talk, we now support bots using web hooks which opens the door for greater chat integrations between Nextcloud and other tools.

What bots do we have so far?

• Call Summary bot – At the end of a Talk call, this bot will compile all tasks that were written in the chat by participants and make a call summary.

• Welcome bot in Talk – The Welcome bot, written in golang, responds to “Good morning” and “Hello” by welcoming new attendees into a Talk room. This bot was written as a basis for you to create your own bot.

Mobile/Desktop Clients: New features!

Nextcloud is available on Android and iOS, to make storing and sharing files from documents to images easy to manage on the go.

Image editing – on the go

Now it’s easy to edit images – wherever you are! Introducing image editing operations for Android and iOS. Rotate, resize, add color effects and so much more to any image!

Other new features & improvements:

• Upload booster for S3. Operations have been sped up (move, upload, copy, rename) on S3 based storage by up to 10x!
• Automatic locking for Office files while they are being edited on the Desktop
• Store E2EE (End-to-End Encryption) key on hardware token
• Enhanced image preview view
• View location and other meta data of photos
• Tighter integration on apps within Nextcloud ecosystem

How to install Hub 6

Ready to foster a healthy meeting culture in Nextcloud? Start developing apps in Python? Then we invite you to install Hub 6! For those new to Nextcloud, let’s make sure you know how to install it.

In general, we offer Hub 6 for download right away. Existing users will only be offered the new version in some time, as we do staged roll-outs. It can take 6-8 weeks, but you can always manually get the latest and greatest! See below for how:

Get Nextcloud Hub 6

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 6 here!

Get Hub 6

Users of the Snap can switch to the testing channels to get the latest version. If you installed Nextcloud through the zip or tarball, you can switch the release channel to Beta to receive the latest version asap.

The post Nextcloud Hub 6: Healthy meeting culture and the first local AI Assistant appeared first on Nextcloud.

26.0.6 and 25.0.11 are available now – just in time to install them before the conference starts and Hub 6 is launched!

I know, it’s a crazy time to release minor updates, just before the biggest event in the Nextcloud year: the Nextcloud Conference, PLUS the release of Nextcloud Hub 6! Sign up to get notified when our launch video premieres!

If you’re like us, you can’t wait to see what’s new. Yes, you can still sign up to see the release, just when it happens! Learn more about the conference here, we are excited to welcome you – in person, or remote!

Now onto what’s new today. As always, minor releases include stability and security improvements that are designed to be a safe and quick upgrade.

You can find the full changelog of fixes and improvements for these releases on our website. Some highlights include reloading of the file list upon sharing, more logging, improved mail settings layout, performance work, bringing back versioning with S3 and enable advanced versioning with Groupfolders, updated translations, typo and documentation fixes, some UI fixes and many other small bug fixes.

Desktop client 3.9.4

Meanwhile, just some days ago, the Desktop Client team pushed out a minor release, 3.9.4, fixing a small number of bugs and minor issues. You can find the full changelog here. Improvements include some changes to the Virtual Files functionality and automatic locking.

Note: There will be no more releases of Nextcloud Hub 2 (24.x.x and older). Upgrade to Nextcloud Enterprise to continue to get security and stability updates or move to Nextcloud Hub 3 or Hub 4. Don’t forget that running web-facing software without regular updates is risky. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed.

Note²: PHP 7.x is no longer officially supported by the PHP community. Nextcloud has supported PHP 8.0 and newer versions for some time now, and we strongly recommend you move to a newer version of PHP. Version 8.0 is already out of active support (!) and has only a few months of security updates left. Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x) deprecates PHP 7.4 but still works with it. Still we recommend you use PHP 8.1 or newer. Hub 4 and newer support PHP 8.2.

Ready to move to Nextcloud Hub 5?

Nextcloud Hub 5 was released in June and we highly recommend that you upgrade to benefit from the latest features. Especially as Nextcloud Hub 6 is JUST AROUND THE CORNER!

A quick summary of the features in Hub 5 over Hub 4:

New optional AI features that respect your privacy, like call transcripts, translation & dictation
Automatic file locking on desktop
Big improvements to Outlook integration plus introduction of Exchange & Teams integration
We make Notes an official app shipped with Nextcloud, with free Android and iOS apps
Improvements to Groupfolders and Circles to make collaboration easier
Automatic, content-based tagging & tags visible in File view
Talk introduces typing notifications, reactions in calls, virtual background images & more
Tables app improvements

Check out the full release announcement here.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are generally painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as a system administrator.

The post Just before the conference: maintenance updates! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Last Thursday, the Digital Markets Act went into effect with the first ‘Gatekeepers designations’. The new EU rules would require Microsoft to stop some of its alleged market-distorting behavior by March 2024, but even if implemented swiftly it is unlikely to create a more equitable market. What we need is more action from the European Commission.

The Coalition for a level playing field, when filing a complaint nearly 3 years ago, demanded the EU ensures:

• No gatekeeping (in other words, by bundling, pre-installing and/or pushing Microsoft services) for a level playing field.
• Open standards and interoperability that make an easy migration possible. This gives consumers a free choice.

The Digital Market Act, according to the EU’s own press release, requires gatekeepers like Microsoft to allow users to “un-install pre-installed apps” and “provide choice screens for key services.” It also demands that gate keepers “allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services” and includes a “ban on ranking the gatekeeper’s own products or services in a more favorable manner compared to those of third parties.”

This would create an expectation that some of the anti-competitive behavior, like bundling and advertising (if not nearly enforcing) OneDrive usage with Windows would cease by March 1st 2024. Of course, the bundling of OneDrive in Microsoft 365 is still there. So the Digital Markets Act, as it currently stands, even in the unlikely case that it is fully and speedily implemented by Microsoft, will only address a small part of Microsoft’s market-disrupting behavior.

Unfortunately, the complaint by the Coalition, launched early 2021, has not resulted in any action, despite repeated conversations.

Awareness of anti-competitive behavior

August 31, a month after an official investigation into the bundling of Teams kicked off, Microsoft announced a concession to EU pressure. Rather than wait until the EU had determined what changes Microsoft had to make to their unfair business practices, they decided to make a minimal change by un-bundling Microsoft Teams from Office and Microsoft 365. This is a clear signal that Microsoft is aware of their anti-competitive behavior under EU regulations, as otherwise one would not expect such a heavily lawyered-up firm to make such changes. Microsoft is not known for handing out gifts.

Rather, their approach is clear: only concede the inevitable, and delay where possible.

Given this, one can expect some changes if and when a proper investigation in Microsoft kicks off – but those actions would take long and go slow. Nextcloud and it’s partners in the Coalition therefor call on the European Commission to act on their complaint from early 2021 and initiate a proper investigation, sooner rather than later.

The post Anti-trust update: Digital markets Act appeared first on Nextcloud.

As the Conference is fast approaching, we would like to additionally present you with the full program for the weekend. From our keynote speakers and panelists, to lightning talks and workshops, we have a full agenda booked that we cannot wait to experience with you!

Keynote speakers

Nextcloud is pleased to welcome the following keynote speakers at our Conference.

Whether you’re intrigued to learn more about European data privacy law from Max Schrems, digital sustainability from consultant Katrin Fritsch or about open source from computer scientist Simon Phipps, you are sure to gain new insights.

On Saturday, September 16th at 10 am, we will kickoff the event with a special keynote announcement by the Nextcloud team followed by the other keynote speakers.

Panel Sessions

In addition to our wonderful keynote speakers, we also have a board of panelists.

Day 1: Trust, transparency, together

On Saturday, September 16th, you will have an opportunity to listen to our first panel session called “Trust, transparency, together.” The moderator of the panel will be our Nextclouder and podcaster Brent Gervais, and our panelists include: Max Schrems, data privacy activist and lawyer, Katrin Fritsch, researcher & consultant, and Daphne Muller, privacy researcher and advocate. You can find more information about this panel session and the speakers here.

Day 2: How to contribute?

On Sunday, September 17th, we will continue with our second panel “How to contribute?” The moderator (and one of the panelists) will be Nimisha Vijay, UX Designer at Nextcloud and the panelists include: James Sundquist, avid Nextcloud contributor and Marcel Scherello, Sales Engineer at Nextcloud. You can find more information about this panel session and the speakers here.

Lightning Talks

On both Saturday and Sunday of our Nextcloud Conference weekend, we will host our famous Lightning Talks!

Lightning Talks are ~5 minute talks covering a wide range of topics from how to build an app to topics on data privacy.

Workshops

After the Lightning Talks on both days, we host 1 hour long workshops so you can learn a new skill or get motivated! From what it takes to actually to build your own app or contribute to Collabora Online (Nextcloud Office), you will get to participate at the conference in a more hands on way!

See you there!

We look forward to meeting you!

Be sure to use the hashtag #NextcloudConf on all your social media platforms to spread the word and share your experience!

The post Nextcloud Conference Program 2023: Keynotes, panel sessions & more! appeared first on Nextcloud.

This blog is your guide to everything you need to know about the Nextcloud Conference.

Our goal is to help you feel prepared, relaxed and excited for an incredible weekend!

What to expect

Our venue MotionLab.Berlin is unique to say the least. The large industrial space of 1.500sqm is full of inviting areas to work like spacious open spaces as well as many small nooks and corners to retreat to – including a renovated bus!

At Nextcloud Conference, you’ll be able to sit and code with like-minded individuals – developers, coders, entrepreneurs and designers – for the whole week. You’ll also have plenty of spaces to enjoy a meal or snack, take time for yourself, and unwind.

We hope you enjoy this space and use it to your full advantage!

Hours of the Conference & Contributor Week

What to bring

• Lanyards: In light of sustainability, we would ask attendees who have come before to bring their lanyard. If you haven’t been before, don’t worry, we will have lanyards and badges for you to wear.
• Nextcloud T-shirt: If you have a Nextcloud T-shirt, please bring and wear it! If not, then there will be T-shirts available!
• Headphones: There will be free time and areas to work in, so be sure to bring your own ear buds or headphones if that’s your thing to get in the zone.
• Laptop (+ charger): You will need to bring your own laptop if you want to use one, as we will not have ones for rent or borrowing.

Arrival

To get to our venue MotionLab.Berlin, the most convenient way is to take public transport with the bus or S-Bahn. The closest S-Bahn station is Treptower Park. The easiest way to enter is via Jordanstrasse, 3rd entrance. To your left, you will find Hall 20 – MotionLab.Berlin.

We recommend to put in the following address into a Maps app on your mobile device:

MotionLab.Berlin in Treptow
Bouchéstrasse 12, Halle 20
12435 Berlin

Upon your arrival, there will be some signs to help guide you.

There is free street parking available but it can fill up. Bikes, scooters, etc. can be parked on the commercial yard, The Bouché-Höfe.

Admission

Once you’ve entered the building, you will be greeted at our registration desk where you will check in, receive a badge and lanyard (if you didn’t bring your own lanyard from the last Conference), and have the opportunity to be able to ask any questions you might have.

Hygiene & safety

MotionLab.Berlin has all the mandatory protocols for upholding a safe environment, including first aid kits around the building and an in-house staff that keeps things running smoothly.

We thank you for your cooperation in being mindful of others to maintain a healthy and safe event.

Code of conduct

The Code of Conduct presents a summary of the shared values and “common sense” thinking in our community. The basic social ingredients that hold our project together include:

• Be considerate
• Be respectful
• Be collaborative
• Be pragmatic
• Support others in the community
• Get support from others in the community
• Our community

Read our code of conduct here.

Sustainability

Nextcloud is committed to sustainable, responsible practices and ensuring empathy in a (digital) society. As we host a major in-person event, we are aware of our social responsibility and environmental impact. Therefore, we will recycle all we can and try to avoid waste. As for your contribution, we ask you to bring your old lanyard and/or Nextloud T-shirt from a previous event to help our cause. We hope to make the #NextcloudConf a sustainable and friendly environment for all so we can continue these events in the future responsibly.

Food & Drinks

Every day of the conference there will be access to free water (regular and sparkling), soft drinks, tea, and coffee. The fridges will be re-stocked regularly so there won’t be any shortages!

In addition, a complimentary lunch is provided during the two days of the conference including vegetarian, vegan, lactose-free, and gluten-free options. By registering for the event, you already filled out your dietary preferences. On Saturday for the party, we will provide pizza which will also have vegetarian, vegan, lactose-free, and gluten-free options.

Breakfast, snacks and dinners (excluding Saturday night) are on the attendee.

Accessibility & Inclusion

We are committed to #NextcloudConf being an accessible event to everyone who wants to participate.

The entire conference will be held in English, however there’s a good chance you will meet other people attending who speak your native language as we attract many international visitors.

The venue is completely barrier-free, wheelchair accessible and accessible for persons with disabilities.

As every year, we will be taking photos and videos throughout the event purely for our marketing purposes i.e. photos for our website and a compilation video of the event. If you don’t want your photo taken or don’t want to be in a video, please let us know during your registration time.

At the Nextcloud Conference, we want everyone to feel part of the community and rest assured they are safe and feel heard. It’s a great time for unity and togetherness as we have fun, share ideas, learn and grow. If at any time you get stuck, have any questions, or just need a mentor, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team via email, Twitter, or through other attendees.

#NextcloudConf Survey

After the #NextcloudConf, we will provide an optional survey for you to provide feedback about the conference. The survey will be available already during the event and we’ll send it afterward in our newsletter!

See you there!

We look forward to meeting you!

Be sure to use the hashtag #NextcloudConf and connect with us on Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram and ex-Twitter, or join our forum to spread the word and share your experience!

The post All you need to know for the Nextcloud Conference 2023! appeared first on Nextcloud.