New maintenance update for Nextcloud Hub 8 is available
Maintenance update 29.0.6 for Nextcloud Hub 8 is here! Read an update summary here and access full changelog on the website.
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Welcome to Nextcloud 17! This release brings major new improvements, especially around security and team collaboration. You can go get the update or read on to find out what is new!
Remote wipe allows users and administrators to forcibly clean files from remote devices, for example in case they are stolen. The video shows how easy it is to clean devices when you need to!
Introducing Nextcloud Text, our new distraction-free, collaborative rich text editor. You can see how Text makes working with others easier than ever in the video.
This release comes with improvements to secure view like enforceable document watermarks based on tags, groups, type of share and other properties. Watch the video to learn more!
And much more, including:
note that we roll out new versions incrementally and usually wait a few weeks before we do so. This helps us catch any problems before it impacts too many users! If you wait for the updater to notify you, it can take some weeks. If you don’t want to wait, you can switch to the Beta channel, refresh the page, update to 17, and switch back!
A major new feature in Nextcloud 17 is remote wipe. While many companies have Mobile Device Management, thanks to built-in support, remote wipe will work on systems not under management of the company. This is useful for home users but also large universities and of course in a scenario where guest accounts were handed to a third party. If you permit downloading of documents by the third party, you can wipe the documents from their devices when the the collaboration has ended.
Remote wipe can be used on a per-device basis by users and on a per-user base by the administrator.
There are many moments when a light-weight, distraction-free text editor is the perfect solution for the task. Note taking, writing down thoughts or brainstorming a little don’t require advanced editors with thousands of features. Nextcloud Text is an integrated, collaborative markdown-based text editor and ships as part of Nextcloud 17. Compared to the test version we made available for Nextcloud 16, this version has much improved reliability and introduces plain text editing with syntax highlighting for code.
Learn how Nextcloud Text and Talk facilitate collaboration in this video.
Nextcloud text in short:
Learn more in our earlier announcement.
Last December, Nextcloud 15 introduced the Hide Download menu option. Since then this feature was used to provide secure view functionality in Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE. With Nextcloud 17, our secure view feature was expanded with admin settings for watermarked text to enforce watermarks on:
Note that the full range of options requires Collabora Online 4.1. For older versions only the ‘all’ option works. ONLYOFFICE supports all these new capabilities as of today.
With secure view, our online office solutions can be configured to open PDF files, images and text files, making these files available in a watermark-protected way, while downloads and other apps are disabled using File Access Control. This setup is useful when data has to be protected from leaking but still has to be made available for review, like in a virtual data room scenario.
Watch a video of watermarking and our new secure mailbox below!
The Outlook Add-in introduces the secure mailbox feature. This feature protects the contents (body) of email from interception by providing the recipient with a notification that a new email was received. The recipient then has to log in on their (guest) account to access the email and its attachments.
In combination with the READ.me app, the body of the email is shown on top of the file attachments. Each email is a folder, linked to in the email notification.
Watch our secure mailbox in action in the last minute of the video below.
The example above sends the link and password to the recipient by email. The user can take out the password and send it through another channel. Alternatively, when a guest account is set up for the recipient, the Outlook add-in will detect this and instead share the message to the guest account and include an internal link in the email. The recipient will have to log into their guest account to access the email.
You might be familiar with this feature from banks, insurance, realtors and other organizations dealing with sensitive data. Protecting the content from emails from leaking is very hard and with the Secure Mailbox for Outlook feature, Nextcloud offers an integrated solution.
Two-factor authentication is very important to protect the security of Nextcloud accounts. Administrators can enforce the use of two-factor authentication and offer a number of options to users.
Nextcloud 17 introduces:
Nextcloud offers the following ‘second factor’ options, any number of which can be enabled by the system administrator and used to validate the login of a user:
Active user sessions can be invalidated through a list, by removing the user in the admin settings or by changing passwords. Users can manage their own sessions and devices. Remote wipe is available from that same screen.
Security is very important to Nextcloud users, and thus a core focus for the Nextcloud team. Every release comes with many improvements, and this is no different. These include:
At the Nextcloud Conference, Nextcloud GmbH also announced a doubling of its security bug bounties to USD 10.000. This means an even larger incentive for security experts to find and responsibly report security problems to Nextcloud’s capable and responsive security team.
If you want to learn more about security in Nextcloud, we strongly recommend to read about the various layers of encryption in Nextcloud and how Nextcloud can save your business from ransomware attacks.
This release delivers a number of improvements in the area of performance, scalability and storage integration.
This release expands the capabilities of our unique Global Scale architecture to Collabora Online. Global Scale is designed to enable some of our largest customers to run a single Nextcloud instance with tens of millions of users. Collabora Online GS integration allows these users to seamlessly collaborate with each other on office documents.
Global Scale has been in production since 2017 in a commercial setup for tens of millions of users across 4 continents. Several other customers have deployed or began experimenting with Global Scale in the last years. Thanks to the new integration, Collabora Online installations at multi-million user scale are now set to roll out.
For smaller deployments, these changes are also relevant: users can now collaboratively edit documents across private Nextcloud servers!
See the Collabora/Nextcloud announcement of Global Scale integration here.
In collaboration with IBM, Nextcloud 17 introduces IBM Spectrum Scale integration.
IBM Spectrum Scale is a high-performance file system for managing data with the distinctive ability to perform analytics in place with comprehensive support for data access protocols including POSIX, NFS, SMB, HDFS and S3/Object. It can provide a single namespace for all this data, offering a single point of management with an intuitive graphical user interface. IBM Spectrum Scale offers high scalability, high availability, automated data management and reliability with no single point of failure in large file storage infrastructure.
On request of several major research organizations and universities, Nextcloud and IBM developed this integration between IBM’s Spectrum Scale and the Nextcloud storage layer. A white paper with more details can be found on the IBM website. An example use case would be when a research institute has a large storage system where research data is written to by scientific tools. Thanks to this integration, this data can be made available real time through Nextcloud and manipulated without the risk of accessing outdated information.
See the announcement of the Nextcloud and IBM collaboration here.
Nextcloud 17 introduces S3 versioning support which allows a Nextcloud server to use the native versioning of S3 rather than its own. This allows a system administrator to manage versions using native S3 tools but, when used with S3 as external storage, also improves compatibility with other applications which access the same data. Nextcloud will then be able to recognize versions created by these other applications, and vice versa.
In every release, Nextcloud improves in performance and responsiveness of its user interface. For this release:
This should help decrease server load and improve the snappiness of the web interface.
With this Nextcloud version comes again a release of Nextcloud Talk. This release delivers the following improvements:
We also recently made available releases of our Android, iOS and desktop clients!
Note that the Android client will have FIDO2 support, which was developed in collaboration with Nitrokey and Cotech. Learn more in the blog by Cotech!
There is much more new and improved in this Nextcloud release. For example, we have a systems overview in the admin settings which shows system package versions to help the admin administer their system. Our monitoring view was overhauled and looks much nicer. Much work was also done in the area of usability and performance. Best check it out for yourself!
See our separate announcement about building virtual data rooms with Nextcloud 17 here.
We talked about Nextcloud 17 at the Nextcloud Conference. Other big news from the event included: