First virtual Nextcloud Conference huge success with over 6000 live views!

The Nextcloud Conference 2020, kicked off last weekend (October 3-4) as a virtual event and it was glorious 🤩

Last weekend, hundreds of community members joined our virtual conference, with YouTube statistics showing our live stream peaked at 293 simultaneous viewers, Saturday alone having over 6000 views of our channel.

Real-time interaction

We had created a dedicated Nextcloud installation for the conference with accounts for all participants to virtually socialize with each other. It was exciting to see everybody engaging in our Nextcloud Talk channel discussing thoughts, ideas and questions with speakers, employees, contributors and other fans, as well as participate in other activities like answering polls & fun surveys we created to keep the virtual experience as fun and social as meeting altogether live! We will share some of the survey results below, but for the live Q&A sessions you’ll have to stay tuned – we have only part of our video recordings ready and included below.

Of course, participants had the chance to explore all new features that Nextcloud 20 introduced on the conference installation we set up for them! Yes, Nextcloud Hub 20 is out, and we’ll get to this right now!

Over 40 talks and workshops with live Q&A and more!

The exciting news has no end so let’s start with Frank’s keynote for a taste! Frank gave an overview of all the improvements made in Nextcloud over the last year. He then announced Nextcloud Hub 20 as the next step, with a number of major new improvements. Last but not least, he announced a series of new collaborations and integrations with other platforms, featuring quotes from several new partners.

Nextcloud 20

The newest Nextcloud major release brought an impressive series of improvements (again!) with focus in productivity, collaboration and your #HomeOffice. A quick look on the features:

The new dashboard provides a great starting point for the day with over a dozen widgets ranging from Twitter and Github to Moodle and Zammad already available

Search was unified, bringing search results of Nextcloud apps as well as external services like Gitlab, Jira and Discourse in one place

Talk introduced bridging to other platforms including MS Teams, Slack, IRC, Matrix and a dozen others

Notifications and Activities were brought together, making sure you won’t miss anything important

We added a ‘status’ setting so you can communicate to other users what you are up to

Talk also brings dashboard and search integration, emoji picker, upload view, camera and microphone settings, mute and more

Calendar integrates in dashboard and search, introduced a list view and design improvements

Mail introduces threaded view, mailbox management and more

Deck integrates with dashboard and search, introduces Calendar integration, modal view for card editing and series of smaller improvements

Flow adds push notification and webhooks so other web apps can easily integrate with Nextcloud

Text introduced direct linking to files in Nextcloud

Files lets you add a description to public link shares

Survey responses

These are only the most important new features! There is, of course, even more about this release, including here performance, design, usability, accessibility and security improvements.

Furthermore, to become an even more useful platform for collaboration, we will be working towards deeper integration with third party platforms. Integrations in Nextcloud 20 already include well known technologies like Slack, MS Online Office Server, SharePoint and Teams, Jira and Github as well as open source contenders like Matrix, Gitlab, Zammad and Moodle among many others.

Nextcloud Hub 20 builds on an open API, the Open Collaboration Services, making integration efforts transparent and well documented.

Nextcloud Conference 2020 Opening keynote by Frank Karlitschek

After the keynote, we gave our community an opportunity to ask live questions in the Talk chat during a panel session with Frank and Jan – we have included the panel in the video above, so check out what important (and perhaps some less important) questions were asked and answered!

Of course, the first day continued with live talks from Berlin, around Nextcloud Talk, desktop & mobile clients, GDPR, security and more. Once we are finished cutting them we will release the videos from Saturday on our YouTube channel. For now, we can only share these moments:

Sunday program – partners, apps and workshops

Yet, the conference didn’t end! A series of talks and 3 workshops were held on Sunday, starting with a keynote on “Why Openness in Education is essential” by Martin Dougiamas.

Dr. Martin Dougiamas is the founder and CEO of the open-source Moodle software project launched in 1999, which includes Moodle LMS, MoodleNet, MoodleCloud, Moodle Workplace and more. He continues to guide and grow the enterprise with the support of 80 team members globally, 90 Moodle Partner companies, thousands of collaborators and hundreds of millions of users world-wide. Martin is committed to making sure the world always has Open alternatives for all the technology and resources needed in education. In this presentation, he talked about some of the current industry trends, the technology battles that are taking place around us right now, Moodle certification program for qualified educators and the integration with Nextcloud. Watch the video below for the full talk!

Many more talks were given, about technology partnerships, improvements of existing Nextcloud apps or new apps, workshops by our team and a lot more! Check some of them in the playlist above.

We have not yet separated the live stream of the first day in shorter videos, but you can get started with the Sunday talks and we’ll let you know soon about the other part. Of course, it is always possible to watch the live stream for both days if you prefer:

Survey responses

And after the conference is over for this year, the most exciting part for us is when we get to know about the awesome feedback people gave about features, talks and in general, everything! Take a look at what makes our day: