At Nextcloud, we believe that everybody deserves privacy. We released the first open-source AI assistant that is hosted where you want it to be. It can get a multitude of tasks done inside your content collaboration platform without compromising your data: in content writing, mail communication, team chats, and more.

Introducing Nextcloud AI Assistant

Nextcloud AI Assistant is a capable and versatile tool that enhances your work throughout Nextcloud Hub to keep writing, communication, and other productivity tasks simple and low effort.

Unlike other AI-powered content collaboration tools, Nextcloud doesn’t share your data with a third party technology provider to train the core AI model. This means that all data you work with, including documents, emails, chats and more, stays yours.

Nextcloud AI Assistant features are available in the main Nextcloud Hub navigation to help you with quick text tasks, and in several apps including Text, Mail, and soon Talk, for app-specific actions.

If you want to read about other AI tools available in Nextcloud, we welcome you to read the AI features overview or visit our documentation portal.

Quick access from your navigation bar

Whatever you are working on, Nextcloud AI Assistant is only one click away. Should you need any help with a small task like generating a headline, paraphrasing a text, or translating a sentence, just click on a icon on the top right corner of the main navigation and give the Assistant its input.

More and more tools are tools are supported with every new version of Nextcloud Hub. Make sure to check out the Nextcloud Hub 9 release blog to find the latest features!

Chat with Nextcloud Assistant

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!

Ask it about your own assets

You can ask Nextcloud Assistant aout your own data with Context Chat. To answer questions about your documents and assets, Nextcloud Assistant gets access to data from different apps, for example Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Collectives and even the Analytics app. You can manually define the scope and even limit it to a specific folder or file for more precision.

Here you can enter your prompt.

You can optionally choose what documents should be used

And here are the results!`

Texts written your way

Context Write is another feature of Nextcloud Assistant powered by context awareness. It can derive context from existing files to convey their unique tone, wording, and even structure to create new texts with the data you provide. Tell Nextcloud Assistant about your working experience and give it a nice CV file, and it will create a custom CV for you. Share meeting notes of a discussion, or the transcript generated from a video call in Talk, as well as a report that looks like the one you would like to create. The Assistant goes to work and creates a report similar to your reference – now review it, and done!

Translate with AI

AI translation is 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.

Language assistance in Nextcloud Text

With help of the AI Assistant, Text has you covered when it comes to perfecting your writing and text composition. The tool is available right in the text, freeing you from distractions and extra tab journeys.

Summaries, replies and reminders in Nextcloud Mail

The Nextcloud Assistant summarizes bulky email threads for you, so you save a hefty amount of time when searching back in your conversations in Mail. All given tasks, suggestions, and questions are displayed in a clear and concise way, so you get an accurate idea of the whole history of communication.

Nextcloud Assistant also generates quick reply suggestions to your incoming emails based on the email texts, letting you quickly respond to them.

Nextcloud 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!

Automatic event creation in Nextcloud Calendar

You can create Calendar events from your emails right in the Nextcloud Mail app. Nextcloud Assistant will automatically generate event titles and descriptions, and even the event agenda. No more going back and forth to set up meetings and reminders!

Smart communication in Talk

Nextcloud Assistant is integrated seamlessly in Nextcloud Talk. We designed it to augment your work conversations and help your team in brainstorming, planning, and clearly expressing ideas.

First and foremost, the Assistant will make sure your discussions flow freely with the ability to translate messages, write texts, and generate media as you chat. Some of those features are available through Smart Picker (type “/” and see the magic!).

However, we don’t plan to stop there and we want the Assistant to become a real participant in the conversation. We are gifting the bot the ability to communicate with you in a most human way possible by answering your questions and providing helpful suggestions for the issues on your agenda. For example, you can ask the Assistant to outline an event preparation plan or to draft a marketing campaign for you using real inputs from your very tasks.

Processing data completely on your server

In everything we do, Nextcloud commits to transparency and trust. Working hard to combine comfort with responsible handling of your data, we made all core AI apps in Hub, including the Nextcloud AI Assistant, fully open-source and running locally on your server.

Your data belongs to you, and not a single bit of information is shared with a third party provider to improve performance, study user behavior, or train an AI model.

You may still want to use popular services like ChatGPT and Dall-E, and we are giving you the freedom to do so in Nextcloud. Before making your decision, you can refer to the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating to find out more about how available AI apps in Nextcloud handle your data and estimate the risks related to code availability, deployment options, and access to training data.

Sovereign AI-as-a-Service

We have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves.

The future: dedicated AI for public sector and more

AI is a quickly developing field. One technology that will be important going forward are text generation models optimized for specific tasks. One example is the public sector where employees are working with large amounts of complicated forms.

Together with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein Nextcloud is working to build a digitally sovereign AI model. Its aim is to accelerate the bureaucratic processes in the public sector with ethical AI-powered content collaboration tools.

The project focuses on crafting a large language model tailored to the specific needs of the offices dealing with state affairs, namely creation of highly standardized texts using accepted language style and wording, optimized search of process-specific information, and other tasks. Anonymized training data provided by the state will be used in its training.

The model in-the-making will be released as Open Source to encourage the adaptation of sovereign, ethical AI within the digitalization strategies of the governments. Context Chat feature, for example, is the first result of our collaboration.

There will be other fine-tuned AI models for Nextcloud appearing over the coming months and years, helping employees in all kinds of specializations with their tasks.

Get Nextcloud Hub

AI-powered content collaboration platform that keeps you in control of your data.

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The post Meet the first open-source AI assistant that doesn’t prey on your data appeared first on Nextcloud.

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

Decentralize your life!

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!

A big design redo

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.

Auto-magic with Nextcloud Flow

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.

A new creative medium

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.

Centralized? Let’s move on!

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!

Your favorite cloud with hip new tools

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.

Collective innovation behind Nextcloud

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.

Design that gives you more

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.

More compact

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.

More tidy

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.

And with a fresh new dynamic background

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!

Even more design improvements

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.

Welcome Nextcloud Flow

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!

How to Flow?

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.

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.

Digitalize processes in the public sector

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

Decentralization through federation

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!

Introducing federated calls

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.

Nextcloud Whiteboard

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.

Performance and scalability

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.

Faster, more lightweight apps

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:

• Skip the time needed to set up a full filesystem for accessing public link-share DAV endpoints
• Delay getting (sub)admin status until needed
• Avoid queries during file share aggregation in Deck
• More lazy app bootstrap

High Performance back-end

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.

Server-side performance improvements

We also worked on the server-side performance, making improvements that reduce the load on your infrastructure:

• Text: Reduce polling interval for read-only users
• Nextcloud Assistant’s Context Chat: improved queuing, with smarter memory handling
• Faster updates: avoiding duplicate repair steps, moving more repair/check steps out of update and to cron
• Command to get information about database changes needed for an update

Database Sharding

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.

Read-After-Write behavior

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.

AI and Nextcloud Assistant

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.

Chat with Nextcloud Assistant

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 with Nextcloud Assistant

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.

Access Analytics with Nextcloud Assistant

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.

New API and a performance boost

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 Files

Nextcloud Hub 9 makes file navigation easier, introduces the File Request feature, and keeps you up-to-date on your shares.

Request files

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.

Filter files and folders

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.

Browse folders with tree view

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.

Nextcloud Office

PDF templates and forms, 3D transitions in slides, better interoperability and security, and more in the new version of Nextcloud Office.

PDF templates and form filling API

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.

Presentations: 3D transitions and quicker loading

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.

Better security and interoperability

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.

Nextcloud Tables

Our no-code platform for data management gets new export and import features, optimized performance and more in Hub 9!

New column type: Users and groups

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 table schema

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!

Nextcloud Talk

Improved moderation features, offline browsing on mobile, and Apple Vision Pro support in one of the most secure apps for online meetings.

Keep your chats healthy

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.

Remove participants

With Nextcloud Hub 9 we introduce the ability to ban users who show disruptive behavior, publish spam links or abuse other participants.

Browse conversations even offline

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.

Don’t miss calls: add a second speaker!

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.

Summon Smart Picker easily

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.

Use Nextcloud Talk with Apple Vision Pro

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

Nextcloud Groupware

Discover multiple security, usability, and navigation improvements across Nextcloud Groupware apps.

Nextcloud Mail

Smart follow-up reminders

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!

Advanced search filters

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!

Phishing detection

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.

End-to-end encryption with Mailvelope

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.

Nextcloud Calendar

More informative event window

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.

Availability display for rooms and resources

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.

Setting calendar as free or busy

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.

Upcoming events in Nextcloud Talk conversations

Now every Nextcloud Talk conversation shows upcoming events happening within, reminding you of future meetings and making room availability more transparent.

Nextcloud Contacts

Delete or rename groups

Easily delete or rename groups with actions from the group menu, saving some of your precious time.

Set out-of-office replacements

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 Clients

Refined design, optimized synchronization and more improvements in Nextcloud apps for desktop and mobile.

More native UI

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 for desktop app

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.

Two-way sync for Android

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.

Nextcloud ecosystem

New integrations join Nextcloud Hub, while our App Store receives a donation mechanism and gets more informative.

New in integrations

LLama 3

A third iteration of the popular open-source LLM with significant improvements in data quality and scalability.

XWiki

Open-source enterprise wiki and knowledge management platform. Integration? Partnership?

Enterprise support for new apps

Dovecot

Full-service email platform by OpenExchange

Stalwart Mail Server

Modern, high-performance email SMTP and MTA solution

Mailvelope

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.

Nextcloud App Store

Donations

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.

Enterprise apps

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.

Improved search and more

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.

Take Nextcloud Hub 9 for a spin!

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!

Get Nextcloud Hub 9

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 9 here!

Get Nextcloud Hub

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.

How to update: AIO users

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.

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The post Be connected with Nextcloud Hub 9 appeared first on Nextcloud.

As the #NextcloudConf24 is just around the corner, we would like to additionally present you with the full program for the weekend. From our keynote speakers and panelists, to live podcasting, lightning talks and workshops, we have a full agenda booked that we cannot wait to experience with you!

Keynote speakers

Whether you’re intrigued to learn more about mass surveillance and data privacy from Dr. Constanze Kurz or European technological sovereignty by Prof. Björn Lundell, you are sure to gain new insights.

On Saturday, September 14th at 10AM, we will kickoff the event with a special keynote announcement on Hub 9 by the Nextcloud team followed by the other keynote speakers.

Live podcasting session

On Saturday, September 14th, you will have the opportunity to listen to our live podcasting session with Björn Lundell and Brent Gervais as they deep dive in a fruitful conversation about the open source in the public sector, public procurement, digital government and other topics.

Panel session – How to contribute?

Nextcloud wouldn’t be where it is without the community of contributors

On Sunday, September 15th, join Nimisha Vijay, designer at Nextcloud, as she puts the spotlight on 3 contributor stories from Nextcloud’s vibrant community.

Lightning talks

On both Saturday and Sunday of our Nextcloud Community 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 knowledge sharing workshops so you can learn a new skill or get motivated!

• Build your first Nextcloud app by Nextcloud team
• Join the Nextcloud forums & Contribute by the Forum Crew
• Setup of a local docker-based development setup by Christian Wolf
• Nextcloud on SUSE Rancher Harvester by Scott Williams

On Sunday, September 15th we will host an 1 hour long hands-on Android app development session. A collaborative hacking session focused on brainstorming new functionalities, squashing bugs, and introducing new engineers to our apps by Tobias Kaminsky.

Group photo

On Saturday, September 14th, we will take in the stage area the famous group photo of Nextcloud’s dynamic community. If you want to be part of it, please stay on the stage area after the Q&A section of the Hub 9 announcement.

Party, code, network

We want to make sure that in this event we will have a lot of time to meet each other in person, relax, code and have fun. At the end of Day 1, stay with us for the party which will include pizza, drinks, music and the beautiful crowd!

A networking space and co-working area will be available for you.

See you there!

We look forward to meeting you!

Be sure to use the hashtag #NextcloudConf24 on all your social media platforms to spread the word and share your experience!

The post Nextcloud Community Conference Program 2024: Keynotes, panel sessions, live podcast & more! appeared first on Nextcloud.

A need for enterprise support for Roundcube

Since Roundcube joined us, Nextcloud began to receive requests from large hosting companies for support. While Roundcube is lightweight and relatively easy to run, businesses prefer that their business critical applications are backed by a serious SLA. There has never been an official Enterprise support offering for Roundcube, but Nextcloud has extensive experience servicing large organisations.

So, today, we are excited to introduce the first official offering of enterprise support for Roundcube! It is tailored specifically for mail providers running large instances with thousands to millions of end users. We also offer our services to help businesses, universities and the public sector, but our offering makes the most sense for larger installations.

Our goal is to help organisations that want to deploy Roundcube – lowering the barrier to entry and helping Roundcube grow. And, of course, the improvements, bug fixes and funds that come out of this will go back into Roundcube, making it a better product for everybody!

Find more about how and why Roundcube joined Nextcloud in this interview with the founders of Roundcube and Nextcloud!

Partners: Open-Xchange, Stalwart and Mailvelope

We are NOT doing this alone, on the contrary. We’ve assembled a top-team of industry veterans and up-and-coming talent, working with mail server solutions Dovecot Pro and Stalwart, as well as the privacy experts at Mailvelope. Together, we’ve created a complete offering of enterprise support for Roundcube for companies looking to host an amazing email solution.

Reliable email with Dovecot Pro

Dovecot Pro by Open-Xchange is a full-service email platform that delivers dynamic scalability, high performance, efficient utilisation of hardware, and outstanding support to the world’s largest Telcos, ISP’s, and Hosters.
Learn more here.

Secure your emails with Mailvelope

Offer customers easy End-to-End encrypted email OpenPGP-based based using Mailvelope. Mailvelope integrates closely with Roundcube, offering a security differentiation to other platforms.
Learn more here.

Serving mail, quickly with Stalwart

Stalwart Mail Server is a secure, fast, robust and scalable on premises email server with IMAP, JMAP and SMTP support. It offers key features, from message authentication standards and transport security to advanced Spam and Phishing detection technology. It offers multiple storage technologies, web based administration and industry-leading security.
Learn more here.

Pick a mail server, choose if you’d like to add PGP encryption, and you’ll be online in no time. Interested? Contact us through the form on our web page!

Background on the support for Roundcube

“The user feedback clearly indicated demand for enterprise support,” said Frank Karlitschek, Founder & CEO at Nextcloud. “The first official enterprise support offering since Roundcube’s initial launch in 2008 delivers on this need and will make Roundcube more accessible to large organisations, encouraging broader adoption of Roundcube and directing resources toward its development.” 

Hosting companies around the world such as HostGator, Media Temple, Gandi, OVH and others use Roundcube. In addition, Roundcube is used by many well known universities such as Harvard University to provide email services to students and staff. We believe that these and other organisations will greatly benefit from enterprise support for Roundcube.

Frank Hoberg, founder at Open-Xchange, said: “Our partnership with Nextcloud brings together two major players in open-source based software to deliver an enterprise-grade email backend support option to the wider Roundcube community. Based on Dovecot Pro, this delivers an email backend with range of advanced features, including its exclusive high availability architecture, extended search, and document previews, along with the highest level of support for mission-critical email they demand.”

Mauro De Gennaro, president of Stalwart Labs LLC said: “We are excited to collaborate with Nextcloud on delivering a reliable and modern enterprise email platform to hosting providers across the globe.”

Thomas Oberndoerfer, founder of Mailvelope said: “We are excited to partner with Nextcloud to integrate our OpenPGP-based end-to-end encryption with Roundcube. This collaboration ensures that users can enjoy secure and private email communications seamlessly within their browser.”

Future releases of Roundcube will be able to work with the new JMAP standard supported by Stalwart, modernising and streamlining email management. Roundcube Enterprise is designed for mail providers, complementing the dedicated Nextcloud Mail solution integrated in Nextcloud Hub, which has a focus on providing collaboration services within enterprises.

Organisations interested in the enterprise support offering can learn more and get in contact on our dedicated Roundcube page.

Leave your thoughts below, we’d love to read them!

The post Introducing enterprise support for Roundcube appeared first on Nextcloud.

DIE ZEIT, a prominent German outlet, interviewed Nextcloud’s founder Frank Karlitschek for a story on Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour on the European office software market. The article addresses a history of Microsoft’s practices that grant the tech giant a possible illegal advantage over local competition, an ongoing litigation with the EU Commission, and possible legal solutions to restore a level playing field for the providers in Europe.

Your can access the original text in German on ZEIT ONLINE website. Continue reading for a recap of the article and the key takeaways.

Since the original article is in German language, all direct quotes used in this blog are translated.

“Does it always have to be Microsoft?”

This is how the original title sounds like, if translated to English. Starting off with Frank’s monthly video calls with the EU commission, Leon Werner introduces Nextcloud’s struggle with the world’s wealthiest company: by employing a range of tactics and making use of its dominant position, Microsoft gains an unfair advantage over the competition and leaves no room for small providers like Nextcloud.

Since 2017, Microsoft had bundled Teams app with its Office offering, driving providers of videoconferencing and chatting apps out and locking Office customers tighter to the Microsoft ecosystem. After an EU Commussion warning following complaints made not only by Nextcloud, but other companies like Slack, Microsoft made a move to sell Teams separately at a symbolic one or two euro fee, thus slowing down the antitrust case.

If services such as cloud storage or Teams were included free of charge, other providers such as Nextcloud would be deprived of their livelihood.

Quote from the ZEIT ONLINE article

Daniel Zimmer, an antitrust law expert and former chairman of the Monopolies Commission, also claims that the network effect still allows Microsoft to stay dominant in the market. “These prices will not ensure that companies will look for a replacement for Teams,” says Dennis-Kenji Kipker, Professor of IT Security Law at the University of Bremen.

Kipker believes that antitrust proceedings are made once damage has already been done. He calls it a “salami-slicing tactic”, a calculated approach that has a long tradition at Microsoft. For example, an article by Wall Street Journal, published in July 2022, explains how Microsoft employs its army of lawyers and lobbyists to push back on its legal challenges with the EU.

The company [Microsoft] always goes two steps ahead in advance, only to go one step back afterwards.

Dennis-Kenji Kipker, IT law expert.

Could Digital Markets Act restore the fair play?

In the 1990s, Microsoft already bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, leading to antitrust actions in the US. Frank Karlitschek wants similar measures for cloud services under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to limit the power of large digital platforms like Microsoft, Apple, and Google to ensure fair competition.

While the DMA, effective since March, is able to regulate some aspects of gatekeeping like brand positioning and interoperability, the scope of affected services remains too narrow. it hasn’t targeted Microsoft’s cloud services that squeeze out numerous smaller providers from the market — as they don’t meet the current threshold of 10,000 business customers. Notably, the DMA only relies on self-assessment, and no cloud provider has reported meeting the criteria so far.

The hope remains that future actions of the EU Commission will more effectively curb the dominance of large cloud providers. To this day, multiple voices have spoken in support of the cause.

The antitrust initiative lead by Nextcloud

Big Tech is harming EU businesses and consumers alike. Many European companies realize that, and this is how a Coalition for a level playing field emerged. To resist harmful effects of Microsoft’s tech monopoly, the Coalition demands an end to gatekeeping practices and establishment of open standards and interoperability that make an easy migration possible.

Learn more at antitrust.nextcloud.com

The post Nextcloud for DIE ZEIT: Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior, PR stunts and salami slicing appeared first on Nextcloud.

Technology brings the world closer together and in the case of Ingenieure ohne Grenzen e.V. or Engineers without Borders Germany, it also provides the opportunity to make a difference around the world.

With Nextcloud Enterprise, Engineers without Borders can manage local and international projects and support their teams through secure file sharing and collaboration.

About Engineers without Borders

Engineers without Borders Germany is a non-profit organization based in Germany that aims at improving the conditions in which disadvantaged people live.

Teams of volunteers travel to countries like Nepal, Indonesia, and Ghana in order to work together with local NGOs and communities on improving access to water, hygiene, and electricity, constructing and renovating buildings after natural disasters, and much more.

To ensure the sustainability of the projects, together with the local NGOs, the project teams train people who are part of the local communities to repair and maintain what they have built together. That way, the improvements can be maintained in the long run.

Currently, over 900 volunteers are active in more than 30 local groups. 14 part time employees in Berlin support them in fundraising as well as planning and implementing their projects.

How they use Nextcloud Hub

Before using Nextcloud, volunteers were sharing files via email and lacked a single place to store information. There was no space to collaborate with other volunteers, which resulted in lower quality communications. It was also difficult to send high-resolution photos, which proved to be especially problematic as each project generates many photos.

With the onset of Nextcloud, that all changed. Nextcloud Files was first introduced so volunteers could store all their data in one place and be able to easily share it internally or externally.

As the organisation must protect their teams abroad, the confidentiality and security that Nextcloud Files provides, which is compatible with European GDPR regulations, was especially important to them.

In order to meet the highest German data protection regulations, their infrastructure runs in a self-managed cluster on permanently rented nodes in a German data center. This is a Kubernetes cluster based on OKD4. Among other things, Nextcloud and its dependencies run in this cluster. Of course, everything runs with high availability to avoid any downtime.

Collaboration with Nextcloud apps

Engineers without Borders utilizes many different apps for their Nextcloud instance:

• Group Folders – the admin team created a group folder for each project
• Nextcloud Calendar – the team uses Nextcloud Calendar to schedule meetings
• Nextcloud Contacts – store and manage all the contact information of volunteers and employees
• CAD Viewer – each project generates many files which can be viewed, marked up, and collaborated on with the CAD Viewer app
• Nextcloud Photos – each project also generates many photos. With Nextcloud, photos can be organized in designated folders per project and shared easily with team members or external parties
• Nextcloud Forms – helps the team create and share simple survey’s
• Nextcloud Polls – helps teams create and share polls

Helpful integrations

Engineers without Borders take full advantage of the many Nextcloud integrations offered. When they found different solutions they liked, they integrated them with Nextcloud to create a one-stop-shop for their work.

• Open Project Integration: Enables seamless integration with open source project management and collaboration software OpenProject. Teams can link files and folders to Open Project, create, find and link work packages directly in Nextcloud, and much more. Learn more.
• Office Suite Integration: Allows the team to view, edit, and collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations within Nextcloud using docs. Learn more.

What their users have to say

We surveyed 121 employees and students at Engineers without Borders to see what they thought about Nextcloud!

Users also like how Nextcloud has:

• Central filing location and lots of storage
• Access to files on all devices
• Integration capability with desktop apps and integrated calendar
• The professional structure
• Collaborative work on documents
• Valuable access to information
• Ability to keep the same link for a folder over years
• Covers many use cases and is open source

and much more!

Nextcloud’s file storage, sharing, and collaboration technologies enable Engineers Without Borders to effectively serve communities in need. With each new project, the team can stay organized and thrive using the capabilities of Nextcloud Hub.

The post How Ingenieure ohne Grenzen e.V. serves global communities with Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

The Nextcloud Community Conference is not your average event – it’s a community meetup that brings together Nextcloud enthusiasts, contributors, developers, users and industry experts from all over the world. Once a year, this is a unique opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals, learn about the latest developments in the Nextcloud ecosystem, collaborate, discuss, contribute, code and help shape the future of Nextcloud Hub!

Nextcloud Community Conference and Contributor Week 2024 will run under the motto “Building a safer digital world”. We are excited to officially announce the dates and the location of this year’s event!

If you’ve never attended our conference before, we invite you to check out the highlights and insights from last year’s Community Conference and Contributor Week. Last year’s program will give you an idea of a tentative schedule and our blogs covering day 1 and day 2 will show you more of what it’s all about.

Please stay tuned for more details about the official conference agenda, exciting speakers and more. You can also stay up to date on our social media channels, community forums and website for updates and announcements.

Call for speakers

Enthusiastic about open-source and all things Nextctcloud? We invite you to speak at the Nextcloud Comminity Conference! Two participation formats are available: you can present a 5 minute lightning talk or lead a 30-60 minute practical workshop. Find more info about possible topics, speaking formats and submitting your proposal below.

Contributor Week from September 16-20

As is custom, after the Nextcloud Community Conference weekend we continue the fun with our famous Contributor Week at the same location, MotionLab.Berlin!

From September 16-20, we invite you to join us to collaborate on Nextcloud improvements in design, functionality, stability, performance and features. It is a unique opportunity for developers to dive deep into the codebase, exchange ideas, and work closely with other Nextclouders. The atmosphere is vibrant and collaborative, fostering an environment of learning, growth, and innovation. By the end of the week, participants not only have gained invaluable experience but also made significant contributions to the Nextcloud project, helping to shape its future. Contributor Week at the Nextcloud Community Conference is a celebration of open-source collaboration, fostering a strong sense of community and collective effort.

We share code, thoughts, inspiration, beer and knowledge, working in areas like:

• Coding (PHP, JS, C++, Objective-C, Java)
• Design & Front-end
• Testing
• Translation & Documentation
• And more!

Event location the inspiring MotionLab.Berlin!

Supporting diversity in open source

Diversity strengthens a community. The Nextcloud Include initiative helps underrepresented groups to join the Nextcloud project, building an inclusive and diverse space where we collaborate and develop world-class software.

We want to support participants from underrepresented groups in Open Source to join Nextcloud Community Conference by sponsoring part or the whole of their transportation and accommodation costs.

Book your free ticket in advance

Mark your calendars and get ready to join us for an unforgettable Nextcloud Community Conference in the inspiring MotionLab.Berlin! Together, let’s empower individuals and organizations to take control of their data in a privacy-respecting and secure manner.

We look forward to the conference and hope to see as many of you as possible for another awe-inspiring year!

Please note that the last quarter of the year is a busy one in Berlin. We try our best to avoid overlap with major events happening in the city, but there’s major events every day in Berlin so we recommend you to plan ahead, and book sooner rather than later!

The post Nextcloud Community Conference 2024: Sept. 14-15, Berlin – Register now! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Hi Nextcloud community!

as we are announcing Nextcloud Hub 8 here at the Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Munich, our customers and partners are presenting their own and unique use of Nextcloud. Tens of millions of users trust Nextcloud to protect their data.

These include private users, running their own Nextcloud, or using a hosted solution from the likes of América Móvil or Deutsche Telekom. Businesses, keeping data on their own servers or hosting at one of our official partners. And the public sector, with universities, cities, governments and international organizations like Amnesty International using Nextcloud to stay safe. They maintain their own servers or host with partners like Bechtle that offers tender-free Nextcloud for the public sector in Germany.

We build Nextcloud to give you control over your data. In terms of who has access, but also what. Our world is digital, and AI is digging through all its data. It can use that for good – create fun meme, summarize your mails or help medical research. But should it operate heavy machinery or be used in the courts or HR departments?

While society finds its way through these dystopian questions, we make sure you have control. Different options, plus transparency over what AI does and how helps you make informed choices. That aligns with our core values of transparency, community and collaboration.

This release introduces many abilities specifically for the public sector. Some of those are AI related, developed together with public sector partners like the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, presenting here today. Others tick off important requirements like our new European accessibility certification, improved scalability or federated chat. But all of these benefit every Nextcloud user, at home, in an office or working in a cafe somewhere!

This release is faster, scales further, and gives you more control over your data than ever before. Whether you watch our release video or read the blog, we are looking forward to your feedback, and, as always, hope Nextcloud serve(r)s you well!

Greetings,
Jos & the Nextcloud team

Performance is now

Nextcloud Hub is the place where everything you need to be productive comes together in a connected, user-focused platform. Working on the improvements in Nextcloud Hub 8, we set a goal to give you half of your day back so you can take a breather!

Nextcloud Assistant 2.0

The first change comes in the introduction of the Nextcloud Assistant version 2. Context awareness mechanics introduced with Context Chat and Context Write lets the Assistant know even more about your work than you do. Worry not about privacy — Assistant is itself a part of your Hub and doesn’t send your data anywhere.

Nextcloud Teams

Shifting gears to teamwork, meet Nextcloud Teams — the next evolutionary leap for Circles. Teams arrives in Hub with the new team overview, quick access to shared resources, and a dashboard widget. And we are only getting started!

Speedy new Mail

A hefty part of your day you spend in Mail. With Hub 8 we made it faster — so you can go home earlier. The background sync is now twice as fast, the improved UI ensures comfort for a smooth morning catching-up, while replying takes less time with the addition of AI-powered suggestions.

Advanced Talk

Reaching out to users from another Hub is a breeze with federated messaging in Talk. More on Talk features, we added message editing, sparing you the delete-and-rewrite dance. Many improvements come your way in conferencing too, making presenting and group calls more comfortable and efficient.

Optimized Files

Hub 8 gets you to your files faster. Enjoy your private, clutter-free space with a Personal files section. Share downloads with confidence using one-time links. Preview and edit files linked across Hub with new interactive widgets. Discover optimized navigation for photos.

And so much more in Hub 8!

BITV 2.0 certification, incredible improvements in Tables, more automation in Forms, major performance updates in Office, and many other news are waiting for you in Hub 8. Get it now to see for yourself, or buckle up as we lead you through every new feature you need to know about.

Nextcloud Assistant 2.0

Build an efficient, sovereign, AI-powered workspace with Hub. Welcome Nextcloud Assistant 2.0, new integrations and new AI deployment mechanics.

Ask Assistant about your own assets

Hub 8 enables Nextcloud Assistant’s new context awareness features. One of them is Context Chat, a smart chat bot that can access your data and answer questions about your documentation, contracts, papers, reports or anything else. You can manually define the scope and even limit it to a specific folder or file for more precision.

Here you can enter your prompt.

You can optionally choose what documents should be used

And here are the results!`

And it’s not limited to Files: we developed an API that allows Assistant to look into Mail, Calendar, Talk, Deck and other apps to fetch info about important meetings, tasks received via emails and chats, and any other data from those apps. Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to gradually implement the Context Chat API across the Hub ecosystem, making Context Chat ever smarter.

Texts written your way with Context Write

Context Write is another new feature of Nextcloud Assistant powered by context awareness. It can derive context from existing files to convey their unique tone, wording, and even structure to create new texts with the data you provide. Tell the Assistant about your working experience and give it a nice CV file, and it will create a custom CV for you. Share meeting notes and ask it to write a formal report similar to your reference – done!

Generate Mail replies and automate events in Calendar

With Hub 8, we add more Assistant features to Groupware tools. Get reply suggestions based on your conversation history in Mail. Create Calendar events from emails without leaving the Mail app, automatically generate event titles and descriptions, and even an agenda. Go ahead – take an extra coffee break!

Chat summaries in Talk

Summarization of team meetings and spontaneous brainstorms in Talk chats makes it easy to get a refresher on previous discussions. The new AI Talk bot can recap your conversations, describe the discussed topics and define tasks based on chat activity. Give it a preferred time to deliver the summary, and it will send it in the chat when scheduled.

Prompt history and even more tools in Assistant

Assistant 2.0 gives you even more control. Access prompt history when you need to reuse your past prompts, and ask the Assistant to stop unfinished tasks if no longer needed. We also gave even more functionality to the Assistant, adding built-in image generation and speech to text features.

Synchronous tasks in Text

Text now supports running Nextcloud Assistant tasks in a synchronous way. If your AI provider is able to return the results fast enough, the Assistant can deliver them in the window right away. If it takes longer, you can choose to run the job on the background and get notified once it’s done.

Assistant on-the-go

Access Assistant from any device on the go to draft texts, compose mail responses and create social media messages — with Nextcloud Assistant now available in mobile clients.

Nextcloud AI-as-a-Service

For these AI features to work smoothly, you will need some serious hardware. This unfortunately will not be a fun experience on your Raspberry Pi. But! Luckily, a number of businesses have started to provide AI-as-a-Service, running various open source models that Nextcloud supports in a way that you can connect to remotely. While this is great, unfortunately nearly all these companies are American-based, with a few in China. If you live in the USA, that is of course perfect – the data stays in your jurisdiction, and you have a choice of local providers. But for our users in Europe, this is less than ideal. The US jurisdiction unfortunately treats the data of European users with less than ideal respect for privacy, in no small part thanks to the CLOUD act signed into law by the former US president Donald Trump.

we have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves.

OVHcloud is thrilled to collaborate with Nextcloud in delivering state-of-the-art Digital Sovereign AI solutions to our customers. We are aligned with Nextcloud’s commitment to offering secure, privacy-conscious AI functionalities that safeguard training data and adhere strictly to GDPR regulations. We are excited to announce that this integration will become available in Q2 2024, marking a significant milestone in our journey towards responsible AI innovation.

Germain Masse, AI Product Marketing Manager at OVHCloud

We are proud to offer Nextcloud customers a solution that complies with European data protection regulations. Reliable, trustworthy, and local AI services will be key to protecting their digital sovereignty for both the public and private sectors in Europe.

IONOS

plusKI brings cutting edge, open source AI technologies in a compliant and digitally sovereign service to the German market. We are excited to work with Nextcloud to make this available to their customers as back-end to the new generation of the Nextcloud Assistant.

Christian Schmitz, Director Open Source at plusserver

Ready for mission-critical deployment

We know that AI works miracles when it comes to automation: it can make your work easier, save your time and hopefully get you back to your family and friends sooner each day. But we’re also aware of its downsides, some similar to the challenges brought about by the big tech firms, some unique to AI.

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant. We want to offer you the best of AI, but also provide transparency and choice. You’re the one who decides where and how to use AI in Nextcloud and equally how to balance its benefits with privacy, environmental impact, and more.

More about our approach to AI and Ethical AI Rating

Building sovereign AI in collaboration with the German government

Nextcloud teamed up with the government of German state Schleswig-Holstein to build sovereign AI tools for state administration needs. This will allow the state office to amplify process automation, create value for domestic digital economy, and notably set an example for AI strategy building within public sectors in Europe and beyond.

Interactive widgets

No more jumping between apps. With Hub 8, we introduce the ultimate shortcut.

Edit meeting notes in a Talk chat while video conferencing, scroll through a project Deck board on a Collectives page, or add a whole interactive calendar to your planning file in Text — you name it. With interactive widgets in Hub, you can quite literally embed one app into another.

View and edit files

Using widgets, you and other users with access can view the linked file contents and make edits without leaving the app. To prevent accidental edits, file widgets in Talk open in view-only mode by default.

Embedded Calendars

Now you can embed a full calendar in many Hub apps to quickly browse events, dates, and schedules. Respecting your privacy, Nextcloud only shows the embedded calendar to users with access, while for others it will remain blank.

Integrated Deck boards

Manage tasks and deadlines anywhere in Hub. Paste a Deck board to browse the contents, open and manage the cards, and even access search and settings.

Nextcloud Office

Better team and project management in Office. Even more automated, even more connected, and even more collaborative.

Manage like a pro with Teams

Nextcloud Teams is a new step for Circles, with a redesigned team overview, a Dashboard widget, and new features to streamline team management. Browse team resources like Deck boards, Talk rooms and Collectives in the team menu. Add new items to share them in an instant. Shared files and calendars are coming soon.

Publicly share Collectives pages

Sharing knowledge with Collectives is now easier, as we take a lot of extra actions off your shoulders. Share individual Collectives pages with included sub-pages via public links. Manage all link shares via sidebar Share tab. Create multiple links with individual permissions to improve security when sharing externally.

Link Forms to sheets

Link forms to spreadsheets to automatically submit collected data to ODS, XLSX, or CSV files. Re-export, create new sheet copies and edit the linked sheets to add more columns with comments, statuses and any other data you need.

Spreadsheets: cell protection, tooltips, and improved filtering

New features in spreadsheets aim to boost security and integrity of your spreadsheets and greatly improve overall usability. Cell protection allows preventing unwanted changes in selected cells, intentional or not, and managing individual permissions for cells. When typing a function name, a tooltip will show you relevant functions to assist you in search. Filtering has been improved with the AutoFilter feature and new filtering options like Color and Condition.

Documents: layout improvements, better navigation and change tracking

Keep the layout of your documents neat with dedicated section editing, separate headers and footers for pages under one style, and support for STYLEREF fields. Browsing tracked changes is now easier thanks to popover tooltips and improved change highlights in tables.

Manage users you follow when collaborating

It’s now easier to follow and unfollow users in your documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The currently followed user is directly visible, so you always know whom you are following. Unfollowing became more convenient too: just click on the list to resume independent browsing.

More than just Tables

Let’s talk about Tables, a versatile data processing app in the Hub ecosystem that elevates your workflow management. In Hub 8, we included improvements in Tables navigation and data imports, as well as introduce a complete new mechanic: no-code apps based on Tables.

Build custom Tables apps

Need a custom app in your Hub to manage a process, centrally access project data, or build a dedicated knowledge base? Now you can create custom Hub apps based on Tables, streamlining management of individual teams, projects, or processes. Aggregate and combine existing tables and views and add them as a new application to the menu bar for quick access.

Navigate your tables in a pinch

All tables are accessible from a single list that you can filter to find the most relevant items quickly. Add tables to favorites to keep them on top of the list at all times, or archive unused tables to clean your space without losing old data.

With Nextcloud Tables, we’re definitely getting to a point where we can replace traditional specialized software, (German: Fachverfahren), by storing the data structures in Nextcloud.

Sven Thomson, CIO Schleswig-Holstein

New ways to import data

Import tables from external files using the upload feature or from the right click menu from the Files app. We improved file parsing to automatically detect more items from CSV and spreadsheet files, such as dates, percentage, currency and decimals.

Transfer ownership with ease

Now users can change the owners of the tables themselves, making it easier to manage tasks without admin permissions. The setting is available in the Edit window.

Nextcloud Files

New Files, featuring your personal file management space, better navigation, and even more ways to share.

Files, your own

Getting lost in a massive amount of shared documents? Enjoy a clean space for yourself with the Personal files section to find all of your own files and folders. Accessible from the web and Nextcloud clients, your documents, drafts, photos, invoices and other items are always close at hand. Plus, we added file recommendations to help you get to recently edited files faster.

One-time links and QR-codes

Sharing is even more secure now with one-time download links. When you wish to share a download with a single user and don’t want the link passed around, check the corresponding box in the link settings. What’s more, now you can generate QR-codes on the spot to share links with ease on web pages, slides, printed materials, and more.

Pictures where you want them

In Hub 8, we added one of the most anticipated features for the Photos app: a dedicated Media folder for all your pictures. Your space no longer shows those annoying memes your colleague keeps sending over, and instead displays photos from the chosen folder. Previews also run smoothly now with ‘blur hash’ so you can scroll through your library more quickly.

Photos widget for Dashboard

While we were at it, we also created a nice Dashboard widget for Photos: it shows you a picture from the past. Good memories, we hope!

Nextcloud Talk

Meet an optimized Talk with much smoother team meetings, Federated chatting, new mechanics in messages including editing, Flavored Markdown and much more.

Message editing

Here’s to cleaner chat! Now you can edit messages in talk to correct typos, update information and add new lines without following up in a separate message. Edits are possible for 6 hours after the message is sent.

Federated chatting

Federated Hub becomes even more united. Now users from all teams can create group chats across federated Talk instances and use many Talk features like mentions, polls, and chat notifications. And even more to come in the future!

For federated chatting, we use the open standard Open Cloud Mesh (OCM) developed at CERN with the help of Nextcloud and other open source projects. The same standard is in use for federated file sharing. In the future, we are planning to expand this into federated Calendar sharing and other features.

Smoother team meetings

Now you can drag the speaker video to pick the best position to fit shared screen content. Current speaker is highlighted in the list for more visibility during large group calls. Call UI is greatly improved: access chat descriptions and post polls during calls, navigate chat messages without interruptions, and more.

New text styles

With Flavored Markdown now supported in Talk, you can make your messaging even more visually rich and informative. With syntax included in Flavored Markdown, you can create tables, add interactive check boxes and format text as a strikethrough.

About using Markdown in Talk

Nextcloud Groupware

In Hub 8, we focused on improving the performance of the whole Groupware bundle, delivering faster Mail with notable design adjustments, more automation and comfort in Calendar, better external compatibility, and more.

Faster, smarter, sleeker Mail

Find the right words with reply suggestions

Don’t have time to compose a well worded, professional reply? Hint: Use AI! Nextcloud Assistant in Mail now generates reply suggestions for you, so you can send a response to incoming mail based on your context in no time.

Enjoy a much faster sync

IMAP accounts without CONDSTORE extension can now sync 2x faster to enjoy a much more agile Mail experience.

Create events with automatic info

Enjoy even more automation! Now you can quickly create an event from the email thread using the More actions >> Create event action. Nextcloud Assistant will automatically pick the event title and description, and even create an agenda based on your conversation.

Save the date: Calendar improvements

Redesigned event window

We improved the event overview window and sidebar view, rendering a more comfortable layout and introducing two window modes: View mode and Edit mode.

Suggestions for free/busy times

In Nextcloud Mail, you can view the free/busy times of attendees to arrange the best time for your meeting. What if the time slot you picked doesn’t work for everybody? In Hub 8, Calendar automatically suggests the next suitable time slot on their availability and let’s you adjust the event in one click.

What’s more, in the redesigned availability window you can quickly manage the event: change the event time or add and remove the attendees.

Nextcloud ecosystem

Together with the Hub 8 release, we roll out new features for external apps, add new integrations, and amplify our whole app ecosystem with new mechanics.

Pop-up update summaries

The change log pop-up feature enables you to deliver update summaries straight to your users in a form of a notification. List new features, bug fixes and improvements and ship them in the appropriate format depending on the user’s role: admin or general user.

Discover in App Store

The new Discover section aims to create a more engaging experience for App Store users. It features curated app suggestions, themed collections, and various related content such as interviews, podcasts, and resources. To app developers, it is also an opportunity to greatly amplify visibility of their apps.

New integrations

Paperless-ngx is an open-source document management solution designed to help you organize and navigate your paperwork with a variety of complimentary features like OCR.

• Transform physical documents into a digital archive
• Organize and customize your library, enjoy advanced navigation
• Use a variety of extra features like OCR and Tesseract

Build apps for Nextcloud!

Whether you want to create mobile apps that connect to Nextcloud, integrate independent apps in Hub, or build dedicated apps, we’ve got you covered! You can build applications in any programming language, make use of our complete API documentation, and follow ready tutorials to get inspired.

Speaking of which, we are constantly extending our library of app tutorials, and this time we added two awesome new guides: a hello world app tutorial and a guide to using Github Codespaces as a developer environment.

New app ecosystem features

The app ecosystem update gives new liberties to app developers. With declarative syntax, now you can define custom setting screens for admins and end users. Opening opportunities for deeper integration with Nextcloud, we made it possible to inject a full user interface in Nextcloud. To aid the contributing developers in localization efforts, we also let you get help from our translator community using Transifex.

Nextcloud Clients

We worked on Nextcloud clients for all platforms, adding some great features to extend functionality and improve performance.

VFS support in macOS app

With Hub 8, we are releasing a new client for macOS that has support for the Virtual File System (VFS). The new sync engine adds more agility to file browsing, presenting all of the files available on the server without downloading them and taking extra disk space. These files will only be downloaded when you need to interact with them.

Easier app updates on Windows

Great news for our Windows users: new versions of the desktop client can now be installed without user intervention in most cases, making the update process smooth without disrupting your work.

MDM in the Android app

Enterprise customers will be glad to read that the Android app now has Mobile Device Management (MDM) integrated. The feature allows you to manage the mobile devices connected to your Nextcloud and therefore greatly improve security controls.

Design improvements for iOS client

iOS client for Files received major design rework in many areas:

• Cleaner navigation bar with new dropdown menu
• New account switcher
• Ability to show/hide the description
• Optimized action sheet
• Improved grid view for files
• Improved icons throughout the app

New level of performance

Organizations big and small rely on Nextcloud to supercharge their collaboration. That’s why we take performance and stability very seriously. Efficient software is not only about getting things done fast and serving a large base of users, it is also about reducing energy consumption and running on diverse infrastructures without losing efficiency.

With this release, we started working on the Database Sharding which lets you split Nextcloud database into several smaller databases and to distribute it among a few smaller servers. The basis for Database Sharding is already here, and we are planning to work on it moving forward to bring the opportunity to our users.

Another noteworthy improvement is in continuous work on the Read-After-Write behavior. Current architecture requires synchronous replication, which reduces the number of database cluster nodes to 4. In the future, we will support an unlimited number of Read nodes that are using asynchronous replication.

These efforts in boosting Nextcloud performance will allow us to accommodate up to 10x more users within a single cluster, moving the scalability of Nextcloud to a whole new level.

This, and numerous smaller but meaningful updates in the frontend make the Nextcloud experience much smoother, not only tackling the challenges of the large setups but also improving the performance for every user. After all, it’s all about giving you more time, achieved with scrutiny of every detail.

Ready to get the feel of the new Hub?

From continuous work on AI features and interface optimization, to various new shortcuts between apps and performance improvements — we tried to make Hub 8 worth your while. This is a result of the meticulous work of our growing team of engineers and designers, our contributors, and the whole of Nextcloud and its community.

Thank you for reading and sticking to the end! We took some of your time with this hefty blog, but we promise to give some of it back with Hub 8!

Get Nextcloud Hub 8

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 8 here!

Get Hub 8

You can download Nextcloud Hub 8 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 Hub 8!

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.

How to update: AIO users

For new Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) users, you can install Hub 8 directly by checking the “Install Nextcloud 29” box.

We have a dedicated setup guide for AIO users. Follow the guidelines to easily set up Hub 8.

The Nextcloud Enterprise version of Hub 8 will become available soon, once we successfully run the additional testing and complete certification.

Nextcloud One: a fully managed cloud platform

Nextcloud One is a fully managed Nextcloud offering from our new partner EpikShare. It is a comprehensive service where the hosting, maintenance and management of a Nextcloud instance are fully handled.

Nextcloud One ensures strict compliance with global data protection standards, including GDPR. This platform integrates workflow management tools, such as rule-based file tagging and access controls, with auditing capabilities, ensuring data oversight and security.

Nextcloud One is hosted within the stringent, privacy-focused jurisdiction of Germany and as such provides a secure, efficient and fully managed Nextcloud environment.

Discover the power of Nextcloud One! We invite professionals who work alone or in small teams to explore how Nextcloud One can help them collaborate in a digitally sovereign, compliant way. Visit their website today and start your journey for free with a fully managed Nextcloud solution.

Thank you to our community!

Nextcloud runs on community power. Users, contributors and developers who dedicate themselves to making Nextcloud better every day are the life force that drives our project. With our whole heart, we thank everyone involved in making the new Hub happen.

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The post Regain control over your time with Nextcloud Hub 8 appeared first on Nextcloud.

Today, we bring you a major update to the Nextcloud AI Assistant with Context Chat, Context Write, GPU acceleration, the ability to split off the Nextcloud server & AI server, and MUCH more! And for those without $100K GPU’s (you know who you are), we have also incredible news: we are working with several prominent European hosting companies, including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to deliver AI-as-a-Service solutions that respect your privacy and digital sovereignty! For our US users and customers, there are already several companies offering AI-as-a-Service and some we support (OpenAI in particular) while others are in the works.

Introducing Assistant 2.0

With a nearly complete overhaul of the user interface AND how our AI Assistant works on the back-end, plus a ton of new, big features, we decided that this is the moment to call this the Assistant 2.0. Let’s go over what’s new, but first a short summary of where we are today!

Nextcloud has a ton of AI features, some big and elaborate, others more basic. Some train a neural network on your data, on your own server to give you a smart inbox in Mail or warnings about unexpected logins from Suspicious Login Detection. Others rely on a pre-trained network that can recognize faces and objects in photos, generate a transcript of your video call or modify text. We can also generate images, translate text and chat messages, and much more. Many of the features are accessible through our easy to use Nextcloud Assistant interface!

Many of these features can help you, save you time, or improve your productivity. And best of all: as always we focus on making all these services available of running on your own server. Given even the US Congress doesn’t trust ChatGPT or Microsoft CoPilot, there are good reasons to want control over the data send to and from an AI service! Our Ethical AI Rating system provides you transparency about the AI used to generate your text, image or classify your photos:

• Is it open source? Can I study how it works and re-train or optimize the model for my needs?
• Is the model freely available? Can I run it on my own server?
• Is the training data open and available so I can inspect it for issues and re-train or optimize the model?

Learn more in our blog post about our approach to AI.

Context Chat and Context Write

And now, let’s explore what’s new: The two biggest new features are Context Write and Context Chat. These both share a lot in common, both providing AI-assisted outputs for you, but they’re also distinctly different.

Context Chat, in short, is the ability for the Assistant to answer questions about your data. You can ask the Assistant questions about a document you have: Say, you have a PDF with the manual of your new digital watch… you’ll be able to ask the Assistant how to set it up, or how to replace the battery. And if your company has a nicely documented reimbursement process in its documentation in Collectives, you can ask the Assistant questions about this process. This is an absolutely amazing ability!

It is not just limited to your files either: we developed an API so apps like Mail, Calendar, Talk and Deck can make their data available too. You’ll then be able to ask “When do I have my next meeting with my boss?” (from the Calendar) and “What tasks did she ask me to work on as high priority this week?” (from Mail). Or “Give me a summary of the status of project X.” (Deck + chat perhaps?)

Context Write, on the other hand, lets the Assistant rewrite something in a certain requested context, or style. Say, you have a nice poem and want to write another in that same particular style. By providing the original poem, then new text of what you want to say, the Assistant will then create a masterpiece. But you can also give it a form, give it your data, and ask it to provide the text you would need to fill in the form. Impressive, and useful!

Big user interface overhaul

Over the last year and a half, we have introduced a wide range of AI features in Nextcloud. Translation, transcription of audio, text and image generation, and more. Then the Nextcloud Assistant came – and we’ve now integrated most of our AI features into the Assistant itself, all available from a unified interface. It is no longer limited to text, but can also generate images and transcribe audio.

Another improvement many of you will appreciate is that you can now see a history, a list of earlier generated images, text or audio transcripts in the Assistant interface. You can even go back and generate more based on your earlier prompts. It is now also possible to cancel a running operation, if desired.

Lastly, as possible inputs to the Assistant you can paste or type text or record audio, and now… select one or more documents as input too!

Behind the scenes

We also did significant work behind the scenes. We made it possible for administrators to make use of AI models we’ve not yet explicitly integrated into Nextcloud, giving more flexibility and versatility to your choice of models to use.

Especially for larger deployments, we have made it possible to run the LLM and other AI operations like Transcription and Context Chat on a separate server, using our new external app ecosystem for one-click, Docker-based deployments. You can also now use a GPU for text generation, transcription and context chat. This means transcribing an hour-long audio file could, on a CPU, take many minutes while taking only seconds on a GPU!

More coming soon

And, of course, this is not all. We have developed an API which can be used by apps like Deck, Calendar or Mail to support Context Chat. This will allow the Assistant to answer questions about your mail, tasks or upcoming appointments! We look forward to these and other apps implementing support for this feature.

Nextcloud Hub 8 – our next version out very soon – will also feature two more app integrations of the Assistant: First, Nextcloud Talk will be able to show you summaries of conversation in Talk rooms, and Nextcloud Mail will introduce email ‘suggested answers’! If you haven’t yet registered for our Nextcloud Hub 8 Launch Event on April 24, this is the time to do so to find out more!

How to get it

So now, you ask: When can I get it? We have good news! Nearly all these features have been backported to Nextcloud Hub 7, meaning they are available in the Nextcloud app store right now. All you need to do is update. If you have not yet tried out the assistant, perhaps this is the time to do it!

To run the AI locally, it’s easiest to use LocalAI. A community container exists for our All-in-one, so users of the AIO can simply go to this page to learn more about adding extra containers and then enable the LocalAI container. Be sure to check out our documentation and ask questions in the forums – you could just start below this post!

IONOS, OVHcloud, plusserver and others bring you…

This brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: For these AI features to work smoothly, you will need some serious hardware. This unfortunately will not be a fun experience on your Raspberry Pi. But! Luckily, a number of businesses have started to provide AI-as-a-Service, running various open source models that Nextcloud supports in a way that you can connect to remotely. While this is great, unfortunately nearly all these companies are American-based, with a few in China. If you live in the USA, that is of course perfect – the data stays in your jurisdiction, and you have a choice of local providers. But for our users in Europe, this is less than ideal. The US jurisdiction unfortunately treats the data of European users with less than ideal respect for privacy, in no small part thanks to the CLOUD act signed into law by the former US president Donald Trump.

But today, we announce that we have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves. Several Nextcloud customers have expressed interest in these features and are preparing to or in the process of testing them. Here’s what our partners and customers have to say:

OVHcloud is thrilled to collaborate with Nextcloud in delivering state-of-the-art Digital Sovereign AI solutions to our customers. We are aligned with Nextcloud’s commitment to offering secure, privacy-conscious AI functionalities that safeguard training data and adhere strictly to GDPR regulations. We are excited to announce that this integration will become available in Q2 2024, marking a significant milestone in our journey towards responsible AI innovation.

Germain Masse, AI Product Marketing Manager at OVHCloud

We are proud to offer Nextcloud customers a solution that complies with European data protection regulations. Reliable, trustworthy, and local AI services will be key to protecting their digital sovereignty for both the public and private sectors in Europe.

IONOS

plusKI brings cutting edge, open source AI technologies in a compliant and digitally sovereign service to the German market. We are excited to work with Nextcloud to make this available to their customers as back-end to the new generation of the Nextcloud Assistant.

Christian Schmitz, Director Open Source at plusserver

We at SUNET are happy that that Nextcloud Assistant is 100% Free and Open Source, runs on-premise and provides useful features that we hope will benefit our users going forward. We enjoy the very productive collaboration with Nextcloud.

Mike Nordin, Sunet, the Swedish University Computer Network

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, algorithmized, 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, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

US technology firms have a large head start on European companies offering large language models and other AI services to smaller firms and end customers. There is a significant number of offerings either using their own models like OpenAI, or providing one or a choice of open models like Llama, Gemma or Mistral as a service. In Europe, Mistral and Aleph Alpha are still working on offering their own models while only a few large hosting providers are looking to offer various open LLM’s in an AI-as-a-service model.

At the same time, there is a growing demand from our customers and users for European AI services. Running AI locally is expensive, and AI-as-a-Service from foreign tech firms is not a solution for most Nextcloud customers in Europe, given the privacy and sovereignty risks inherent to shipping large amounts of crucial data overseas. For this reason, we have been working with a handful of providers to offer their AI services. To speed up the process, we connected them with potential customers. As you can imagine, offering a service when it is unclear who its customers might be is not easy. But several universities are interested in the ability to outsource some heavy AI operations, so there is now movement towards AI services. This means not only our users, but the wider European ecosystem will be able to benefit from this!

Public availability of the European AI services is expected in the course of spring and summer, with some even aiming for late April/early May!

Thank you!

We are super excited about this release and we’d like to thank everybody who contributed, with testing, reviewing code but also the universities who are willing to test the AI services, and of course OVHcloud, IONOS, plusserver and our other partners who’d like to provide these services!

The post Nextcloud releases Assistant 2.0 and pushes AI-as-a-Service appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud calls upon the regulators to look through this charade and not be deterred in their efforts to reign in the anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft.

Antitrust cases against Microsoft

There is a series of antitrust cases against Microsoft. The case by Slack resulted, 3 years after filing, in an investigation and is behind Microsoft making a minor concession here, following similar approaches by Apple as it tries to comply in the most minimal way with new EU regulations.

Early 2021, Nextcloud filed an antitrust complaint and, later that year, together with a coalition of some 30 NGO’s and other European tech companies, called publicly on the EU to take action. But, while it also has been well over 3 years, unfortunately there has not been any progress. It is unclear whether that is because the complaint came from a number of smaller companies, due to delay tactics by Microsoft or simply slow bureaucracy.

What it is definitely clear is that the regulators are not able to keep up with the pace at which technology moves and big tech firms abuse their power.

The post Microsoft slows antitrust case by unbundling Teams appeared first on Nextcloud.