Hi everyone!
We are launching Nextcloud Hub 9 in Berlin from the Nextcloud Conference, our yearly community contributor and user event. Being here always reminds me of why we started Nextcloud in the first place: putting you back in control over your data.
More and more of our digital lives are controlled by a shrinking number of big tech firms and their CEO’s. We believe there is a better way.
So we designed Nextcloud with decentralisation in mind. You can run it at home, in your business, your government agency or your local sports club. You decide who has access, and when the services of a big tech firm fall over, you can keep working.
But life isn’t about being alone on an island – it is about connecting people! Nextcloud Hub 9 is perfect for that, too. Our Federation features allows Nextcloud servers to talk to each other, bringing our tens of millions of users together from across the globe.
Of course, this release brings much more than federation. We help the public sector automate its processes so they can help you better; a chat mode in our AI Assistant; we introduce a brand new whiteboard to support your brainstorms and meeting notes; and there is a new more compact design with a fresh new background!
As always, we look forward to your feedback! Nextcloud is people, as much as technology, and if you want you can come say hi to us at the dozens of events we visit every year. Check out our event list and meet some fellow Nextclouders!
Greetings,
Jos & the Nextcloud team 💙
Nextcloud Hub has grown into a leading open-source platform for collaboration, thanks to our tireless efforts to excel in privacy while bringing new cutting-edge features to the table with each release. Today, we launch Nextcloud Hub 9, a new iteration of our platform that pioneers automation tools, empowers teams, and drives digital transformation.
Sounds ambitious? We call it Tuesday!
To make Nextcloud more tidy and efficient while adding all the new features, we introduced countless design improvements around the entire platform and its applications.
Our new Windmill-based app, part of Nextcloud Flow automation features, is an enterprise-focused process automation engine that is deeply integrated in Nextcloud Hub. It makes it possible to automate processes and flows: taking data from a form, parsing a PDF in an email, or processing a spreadsheet import, it kicks off actions like processing a payment through a third party provider, storing results in a table, notifying a user to approve the state and then generating and emailing a PDF.
With the new Nextcloud Whiteboard, get creative together: even organize a drawing class in Nextcloud Talk! Now you have a limitless canvas to sketch, draw and plan collaboratively anywhere, even inside Nextcloud Talk calls.
It is time to stop depending on big tech firms that control every aspect of our lives, and federation is the key! It means decentralising while letting separate systems interact with each other – exactly how email works. With Nextcloud Hub 9 we bring federation from files sharing and now to chats and video calls!
We improved Nextcloud Hub with numerous new features throughout: Nextcloud Assistant’s Chat UI and support for hundreds of new languages for AI translations, a new wizard to request files in Nextcloud Files, AI-powered follow-up reminders and phishing detection in Nextcloud Mail, augmented reality calls with Nextcloud Talk, an easy way to fill in forms in Nextcloud Office, and so much more.
Nextcloud is rooted in community, standing on the foundation of collective innovation. On behalf of the Nextcloud team, we want to thank everyone involved in coding, testing, sharing, providing feedback, supporting, and nurturing Nextcloud Hub, giving us a reason to celebrate this new release together.
Join us to discover all the new features in Nextcloud Hub 9.
Sign up now to watch the webinar recording for free!
We believe that software should be accessible to everyone and everywhere, easy to use and always ready to work the way you expect it to. As new features and apps join Nextcloud Hub, we want to make sure we stay true to these principles.
If you have a feeling that something is different this time around, you are right! With more and more features being added every release, we want to prevent a sense of overwhelm in Nextcloud Hub’s interface. That’s why we gave our interface a make-over, letting the whole platform evolve while remaining highly accessible and user friendly.
First, we made everything more compact by downsizing various elements: input fields, buttons, links. This change lets us make use of the space more efficiently compared to our old interface. The new design is more cohesive and user-friendly, and we trust you’ll notice the difference once you experience it.
Using rounded corners for various elements like buttons and fields, we achieved a more balanced aesthetic that maintains a relaxed visual experience without being overly stylized. It feels familiar across modern apps and devices, and it also allows for more efficient use of visual space.
In Nextcloud Hub, you can also use any background you wish. The interface color scheme adjusts to match your background’s palette, giving your platform a cohesive and polished appearance — even on your mobile devices!
We are celebrating the new look of Nextcloud Hub with a new background style available in your Appearance settings. The new version supports dynamic backgrounds that adapt to your light or dark interface theme preferences. This background is the first to support themes in Nextcloud Hub 9, with more dynamic background designs coming soon!
Nextcloud Hub 9 brings multiple other feature- and app-specific improvements across various applications: Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Calendar, our mobile and desktop clients, and more. We are going to discuss them in the dedicated sections of this blog in more detail.
Now let’s move to new features, starting with one particular app that enables a whole new dimension of functionality in your Nextcloud Hub.
For most of us, it is easy to imagine learning, shopping, and banking from your mobile phone no matter where you are. For some, even accessing a government service entirely from the comfort of their home is a reality. For others — hopefully a future.
Nextcloud offers an extraordinary platform to work in, fully digitally. Our apps let you effortlessly handle, share and work on documents with Nextcloud Files and Nextcloud Office or track and process structured data with Nextcloud Tables. Nextcloud Talk and Nextcloud Groupware help with planning and communication, and dozens of other apps help with tasks like processing forms, tracking tasks and more.
All this is built on an open standards based platform. The Open Collaboration Services API supported by Nextcloud makes it easy to connect with other systems, sending or receiving data and building new apps.
The introduction of our new Windmill-based application brings digitalization to a new level. It allows automation of processes, taking data from within and outside of Nextcloud, tying in with its communication and planning tools and thus acting as a conductor leading an orchestra of processes!
Nextcloud Flow combines features that help Nextcloud automate a variety of processes in your organisation. It consists of several components, from our Open Collaboration Services API (OCS API) and our structured data management application Nextcloud Tables to our existing workflow tool to our brand new business process automation application based on Windmill.
Windmill integration in Nextcloud Hub automates repetitive tasks by integrating your Nextcloud Hub apps and related assets into cohesive workflows. For instance, vacation requests, payment confirmations, or approvals for accessing and sharing data. The app provides a graphic interface to design, manage, and monitor workflows, making it easier to automate processes and improve efficiency.
The automation, build with the open source team at Windmill, uses everything that makes Nextcloud such a powerful platform: file handling, chat, notifications, structured data in Nextcloud Tables, Nextcloud Office and much more. Dozens of API’s have been developed, all as part of the standardized Open Collaboration Services API, making it easy to connect Nextcloud to other systems.
Understanding the flows
Windmill identifies events in Nextcloud Hub and triggers custom ‘flows’ created by you to retrieve and exchange data and perform sequences of actions across various apps and assets. Each flow is composed of ‘bricks,’ or individual actions that you program using a script.
The new workflow automation app is very flexible. It can run consecutive flows, or execute multiple flows in parallel, trigger an approval request for an employee, interact with external services like payment systems, and much more.
Windmill integration in Nextcloud Hub has been designed to help the public sector comply with legislation like The Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz, OZG), a law in Germany that mandates citizens’ ability to interact with government services online, or with the EMBAG legislation in Switzerland that requires the public sector to use and develop open source solutions.
You can learn more about the challenges the public sector faces and how Windmill integration in Nextcloud Hub can help in our earlier blog post.
“The Online Access Act obliges the public sector to provide all administrative services digitally going forward. Open source software should be prioritised here. We are therefore delighted that with ‘Open Collaboration Services’, a 100% open source solution has been created for the first time with which specialised procedures can be implemented quickly and easily. Open source enables the simple sharing of specialised procedures on Open CoDE, which saves costs and strengthens digital sovereignty.”
Markus Richter
State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community and Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology
Federated features allow users of self-hosted platforms like Nextcloud Hub to communicate, share files, and collaborate across instances while storing their data locally. Federation is a foundational tool for digital sovereignty, enabling the creation of decentralized yet interconnected ecosystems.
Prior to the Nextcloud Hub 9 release, federated features supported in our platform included file sharing and collaboration, as well as federated chatting in Nextcloud Talk. Today, we are excited to announce that federated video calls also become available to our users!
Users can join group chats on another Nextcloud server with their Federated Cloud ID. While in federated chat, they can use many of the core features like user mentions, markdown formatting, or polls.
With Nextcloud Hub 9, we add federated calls to our growing array of decentralized features. Now you can organize audio and video meetings among users of different Nextcloud Hubs — to meet with colleagues from a different government agency, or maybe a partner who is using Nextcloud too!
Joining a call on another server feels as if you are still in your own Nextcloud Hub – using your own account and a preferred interface, without a need for creating guest accounts or public links.
OCM, a foundation for federation features in Nextcloud 🧬
Federated Cloud Sharing API in Nexctloud has been invented by Nextcloud founders Frank Karlitschek and Bjoern Schießle. It is a collaboratively developed standard that is a part of Open Cloud Mesh (OCM), an initiative of the GÉANT Association, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education.
With Nextcloud Hub 9 , we are introducing a new collaborative app: Nextcloud Whiteboard. It gives you a limitless canvas and a range of tools to sketch, note, plan, or brainstorm together with your team.
Nextcloud Whiteboard works seamlessly with Nextcloud Talk. For example, you can brainstorm project structures and draw mind maps together in real-time while in a call. Or use it in a live workshop to illustrate concepts, create diagrams, and interactively engage participants.
Nextcloud Whiteboard is very intuitive and easy to use, ready to become your daily creative collaboration tool right away. It supports hand drawing with multiple colors and stroke types, shapes, images, arrows and other objects. Wide ranges of shapes like rectangles, circles, diamonds, arrows, lines and more, together with arrow-binding and labeled arrows, let you be flexible and creative without the need for an entire design suite.
Combine it with other media: draw on design mock-ups, building plans, schemes and other visuals by importing images of your own into the canvas.
Once ready, you can share your whiteboard and present it using the laser pointer feature, or invite users to collaborate with you, even from outside Nextcloud. Want to save or share your drawings as files? You can easily export them in PNG or SVG or copy to your clipboard.
We never stop working on Nextcloud Hub’s performance, realizing that it benefits not only end users and admins running our systems, but also the planet we all share. That’s why no matter how much more powerful we keep making Nextcloud, we allow it to use less resources with every update, considerably lowering its environmental impact. And of course, allowing it to run on more diverse hardware without loss in performance too.
One of the steps towards better performance in Hub 9 has been a switch to Vite, a tool to bundle the JavaScript. This reduced the size of our apps significantly, making some up to 5x smaller and thus load much faster fir everyone.
We also made numerous other improvements that make Nextcloud Hub more snappy overall:
Since 2021, Nextcloud Files runs on the High Performance back-end written in Rust that reduced its network traffic consumption by up to 90%. It also made the app swifter for users, for example by enabling instant notifications.
With Nextcloud Hub 9, we introduced support for High Performance back-end to Nextcloud Text. It greatly reduces the server load and renders edits much faster with accelerated synchronization during collaborative sessions.
We also worked on the server-side performance, making improvements that reduce the load on your infrastructure:
In our last release, we introduced the foundation for Database Sharding, enabling the ability to split the Nextcloud database into several smaller databases and distribute the load across multiple servers. With Nextcloud Hub 9, we’ve continued to develop this feature, making it applicable for most use cases.
Previously, Nextcloud required synchronous replication, limiting database clusters to a maximum of four nodes. Now, we added support for an unlimited number of Read nodes using asynchronous replication. Combined with database sharding, Nextcloud’s scalability has significantly advanced, allowing a single cluster to support up to 10 times more users.
Chat with Nextcloud Assistant, translate between hundreds of languages, work with Analytics and enjoy accelerated performance.
AI has become an integral part of Nextcloud Hub: Many core applications like Nextcloud Mail and Nextcloud Talk have their own built-in AI tools, while Nextcloud Assistant is getting more capable both feature-wise and in the back-end. At the same time, we integrate Ethical AI principles into our platform, enabling new AI features with a focus on privacy, transparency, and user control.
Nextcloud Assistant becomes even more convenient with a chat interface, where you can give prompts and ask questions in a dialog format. It will remember your conversations, making interactions more natural and smooth. Chat about your day, work on the next press release, or proofread your social media posts — locally on your server and without any data leaks!
Translate app is now available directly from Nextcloud Assistant menu. Translation options are now almost limitless, as we added support for hundreds of languages that app can detect, read and translate to. The app can be deployed as an ExApp on a separate server, and now supports CPU and GPU, increasing performance and efficiency significantly.
Analytics, an application for processing and managing analytics data developed by our community, added supprt for Nextcloud Assistant’s Context Chat. This means that you can now ask it about the data from Analytics, and Context Chat will give you an answer if the app has relevant figures.
We developed a new API that significantly improves the performance and scalability of the AI in Nextcloud, while also enabling the creation of new AI features. For example, it allows Assistant’s responses in the chat to be nearly instant, provided your back-end is sufficiently performant.
Nextcloud Hub 9 makes file navigation easier, introduces the File Request feature, and keeps you up-to-date on your shares.
Need to collect files in a secure way from one or more users? Meet File Request, a feature that lets you request files with configurable security settings and tracking features.
To get started, click Create file request from the “+” menu of Nextcloud Files. Set a title and a description of your request and pick a drop folder. Set an expiration date and a password for your share, if you need an extra security layer.
When ready, you can simply share a link anywhere you prefer or add email addresses of recipients to share them right away via email. Every recipient will be asked to enter a name before dropping a file, to keep things on track.
Pasted a link in the wrong place? We’ve got you! To keep your requests under control, you can browse and manage active requests in the right sidebar and close them as needed.
We also added a push notification option to help you keep track of your files and folders. Now you can get notified if a user uploads a file you requested or downloads one you shared with them.
When you keep a lot of files in your system, navigating your library can become cumbersome, and time-consuming too. If you add just two more files daily, that’s already 60 more per month! To help you find what you need faster, we introduce file filters.
You can filter your files by file type, modification date and people. Fine-tune your browsing by combining different filters and filter types, and success is guaranteed.
Navigating complex folder paths is now easier with the folder tree view. The left sidebar in the new Nextcloud Files offers a classic tree-style display of your folders, making it simple to browse intricate project folders.
PDF templates and forms, 3D transitions in slides, better interoperability and security, and more in the new version of Nextcloud Office.
A new feature in Nextcloud Office for this release is the ability to handle document templates with forms. When a template document has a form, Nextcloud will provide a nice, easy-to-use interface for the user to fill in details. Then, the document will be created and opened, and the user can check if everything was added correctly and if they want to make any changes.
The form system is very powerful, yet easy to use. For example, you can fill in time-sheets, complete feedback forms, and do much more. And it’s not only limited to text: you can even create charts based on data from your documents. Organisations that use a lot of forms can use this to make the life of their team members a lot easier!
Developers can use the new document API in Nextcloud Office to create multiple documents from a central database or template, or collate information from multiple documents.
It is possible to streamline automated document creation by linking a database to a template using scripts. With templating, you can automate many interactions like reporting, proposal generation, client on boarding, or even production of marketing collateral.
Of course, the new Office API is available in the new Nextcloud Flow, which can automate a variety of things, from extracting data from documents to filling them in.
The presentation editor now supports fancy 3D transitions between slides that make your slideshows more dynamic and catchy. These use WebGL, putting the GPU in your laptop or desktop to work for buttery smooth animations.
You can access transitions via the transitions widget located in the editor’s sidebar. And the widget itself has been revamped too!
Presentations also became much faster all around, with swifter document opening and slide loading, and overall smoother scrolling and rendering of the elements.
Rootless containers in Nextcloud Office now operate without requiring special privileges from the user, thanks to Linux Namespaces. This optional feature enhances security by isolating container processes more effectively.
Our Office suite in Nextcloud Hub 9 features improved security with several new features. The newly introduced Wholesome Encryption for ODF files offers enhanced performance, better tamper resistance, metadata hiding, and increased resistance to brute-forcing with the Argon2id key derivation function.
Nextcloud Office also became more interoperable. Work with metric-compatible Microsoft fonts has been improved together with compliance with ISO/IEC 29500 standard. New Excel-compatible functions were added like FILTER, SORT, and SORTBY, along with a smart justify feature.
Our no-code platform for data management gets new export and import features, optimized performance and more in Hub 9!
Assign a colleague or a team to a task in a table by adding their clickable name with a new column type Users and groups.
Export the table schema and import it as a new table to quickly create tables with a similar structure and populate them from scratch. This handy templating feature helps you quickly move tables from testing to production when you build environments based on Nextcloud Tables. And, of course, you can exchange these between organizations: Each city needs to handle things like a dog tax or registering a new citizen!
Improved moderation features, offline browsing on mobile, and Apple Vision Pro support in one of the most secure apps for online meetings.
Inside public conversations or during online events, it’s important to have a firm way to moderate the conversation, uphold your community guidelines and deal with potential spam. Nextcloud Talk features many moderation tools that help you maintain a safe and healthy environment like role management in chats, time tracking of who’s speaking, voice muting, and more.
With Nextcloud Hub 9 we introduce the ability to ban users who show disruptive behavior, publish spam links or abuse other participants.
Users of Nextcloud Talk on Android devices can now browse past conversation lists and chat messages offline, to quickly get back to important information even without needing an internet connection.
Away from your laptop? Not an excuse to miss a call! Now you can choose a secondary device, like your Bluetooth headphones or a kitchen speaker to notify you of incoming calls. To activate the feature, head to notification settings and select a second output device.
You can now summon the Smart Picker in Nextcloud Talk via the attachment menu to add GIFs and videos, generate images with AI, link conversations and Deck cards, and even send map locations. For quick access to Smart Picker, you can type a “/” shortcut in the message box as usual.
When we say you can have your meetings anywhere, we mean it! Now you can join calls even in a virtual environment using our Nextcloud Talk app for your Apple Vision Pro headset 🎉
Discover multiple security, usability, and navigation improvements across Nextcloud Groupware apps.
The Nextcloud Assistant can already summarise email threads and generate meeting agendas from the your email content. With Nextcloud Hub 9, the Assistant can also check emails to see if the sender expects a reply: If it determines an email needs a follow-up, it will place it in a Follow up section to make sure you don’t forget!
Filter your inbox based on various conditions, such as subject line, sender, or tags with new email filtering mechanism. Unlike most other mail clients, Nextcloud Mail installs these filters as sieve scripts on the server, meaning the filters work regardless of which client you’re using. No need to set up the filters on your desktop and also your laptop, and then be annoyed they are not applied when you check mail on your phone!
Some modern phishing emails are becoming exceedingly sophisticated, and therefore dangerous! And sometimes you’re moving quickly through your day, without an eye on potential dangers. In this case, Nextcloud keeps you alert about risky links and phishing or impersonation attempts by showing you a warning message.
Want to encrypt your mail using PGP? We’ve worked with the team behind Mailvelope to make sure the plugin works reliably with Nextcloud Mail, and also introduced a simplified domain registration feature for your convenience.
The new sidebar in Nextcloud Calendar groups events, showing if they are your personal calendars, shared, which app they come from, and groups all hidden calendars together.
Before creating a new event, you can check the availability of Talk conversations and resources. Easier planning of all online meetings with less risk of anything going not-quite-as-planned.
Now you can decide if Nextcloud Hub shows your status as free or busy during events in your calendar. For example, you can set a calendar as transparent so it never changes your status to Busy.
Now every Nextcloud Talk conversation shows upcoming events happening within, reminding you of future meetings and making room availability more transparent.
Easily delete or rename groups with actions from the group menu, saving some of your precious time.
When setting a Nextcloud-wide out-of-office status, you can assign another user or colleague to be your replacement during your absence. Their name will be visible in other apps like Nextcloud Talk, Nextcloud Mail, Nextcloud Calendar, and other locations throughout Nextcloud Hub.
Nextcloud Hub 9 lets you strengthen your security and administrative controls even further with several new fine-grained security tools and mechanics:
Refined design, optimized synchronization and more improvements in Nextcloud apps for desktop and mobile.
We revised the design of Nextcloud clients for Windows and iOS to make them look more native in many ways, including transparency, buttons, spacing, and more.
New release channels are now available for the desktop client. Use the Daily channel to
stay ahead with the latest features and improvements in the making, or Enterprise channel with updates for enterprise customers.
With two-way sync enabled for a folder, files added or updated on device automatically sync to your cloud, and the other way round. Currently, only internal folders created in Nextcloud are supported.
New integrations join Nextcloud Hub, while our App Store receives a donation mechanism and gets more informative.
New in integrations
A third iteration of the popular open-source LLM with significant improvements in data quality and scalability.
Open-source enterprise wiki and knowledge management platform. Integration? Partnership?
Enterprise support for new apps
Full-service email platform by OpenExchange
Modern, high-performance email SMTP and MTA solution
PGP for end-to-end email encryption.
All these open source technologies are available with our community edition, but we also partnered with the projects and companies behind them to offer an enterprise solution for our customers.
We want to give app creators an opportunity to spend more time on their apps for Nextcloud. So, we introduced donation links in our app store, allowing users to provide a tip to the developer of their favorite app. We support links to PayPal, Stripe and other solutions. Nextcloud keeps no commission — 100% of the funds goes to the developers. You can read more about donations in our documentation.
While donations are great, we believe the best approach to monetization for open source are enterprise subscription services when possible. So we offer app and integration developers the chance to work with us to offer an enterprise subscription from our app store – making it easy for prospective customers to request a quote.
We also made a number of UI improvements, including a better search and the ability for app developers to signal needs about their app or notify about their update policy.
If you’re still with us, it means we’ve successfully brought you to the most important part of this journey.
Nextcloud is not a craft of marketing, it is a craft of engineering with true passion for privacy, transparency and humanity. That’s why we keep bringing the results of our work to you for free. Click below and start using the latest and greatest of Nextcloud Hub today! 🚀
You can download Nextcloud Hub 9 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 Nextcloud Hub 9!
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.
For new Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) users, you can install Hub 9 directly by checking the “Install Nextcloud 30” box.
We have a dedicated setup guide for AIO users. Follow the guidelines to easily set up Hub 9.
The Nextcloud Enterprise version of Hub 9 will become available soon, once we successfully run the additional testing and complete certification.
On December 3rd, we invite you to the Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris, Nextcloud's flagship event for professionals. The day will kick off with a keynote by our CEO and founder, Frank Karlitschek—a highlight where he will share our vision for the future of online collaboration, followed by a major announcement about Nextcloud Talk!
Per saperne di più
Nextcloud has been recognized with the World Summit Award Germany that selects and promotes local digital innovation improving society, aiming to contribute to the United Nations' agenda of sustainable development goals.
Per saperne di più
Maintenance updates 28.0.12, 29.0.9 and 30.0.2 for Nextcloud Hub 7, 8 and 9 respectively are here! Read an update summary and access full changelog on the website.
Per saperne di più
