Be connected with Nextcloud Hub 9

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!

Introducing Nextcloud Hub 9: a webinar

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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.

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.

Understanding the flows 

Windmill identifies events in Nextcloud Hub and triggers custom ‘flows’ created by you to retrieve and exchange data and perform sequences of actions across various apps and assets. Each flow is composed of ‘bricks,’ or individual actions that you program using a script.

The new workflow automation app is very flexible. It can run consecutive flows, or execute multiple flows in parallel, trigger an approval request for an employee, interact with external services like payment systems, and much more.

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.

OCM, a foundation for federation features in Nextcloud 🧬

Federated Cloud Sharing API in Nexctloud has been invented by Nextcloud founders Frank Karlitschek and Bjoern Schießle. It is a collaboratively developed standard that is a part of Open Cloud Mesh (OCM), an initiative of the GÉANT Association, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education.

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 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.

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.

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.

More improvements in Nextcloud Files

• Ability to keep the folder structure when uploading
• Group folders ACL: visual feedback when ACL update fails
• Small Group folder improvements
• Ability to enforce windows-compatible file names on the server
• Server-side DAV pagination
• Account management: sorting by last login
• Possibility to upload a complete folder from a “+” menu
• Delegate “Super-Admin” for user management
• Allow to specify the token of a public share / share renaming
• Improved grid view UI in Files

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!

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!

More in Nextcloud Office, Nextcloud Tables, and Nextcloud Collectives:

• New functions in spreadsheet editor: FILTER, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE, RANDARRAY, XLOOKUP, XMATCH
• Support of importing and exporting OOXML pivot tables (cell) format definitions
• “Copy Cells”, or “Fill Series” options when autofilling by dragging from a corner of cells in Calc
• Correct usage of ordinal suffixes 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on
• Right click to insert and delete comments in Calc
• Formula wizard interface improvements
• PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster
• Pressing Enter in an empty list item ends the list
• Transitions widget located in the sidebar has been revamped (it now uses iconView)
• Admin warnings to display if you have mis-configurations
• Firefox performance optimization and reduced garbage-collection giving snappier browser experience closer to that of Chrome / WebKit
• Continued accessibility improvement and widget annotations

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.

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.

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 Mail ✉️

Nextcloud Calendar 🗓️

Nextcloud Contacts 🪪

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.

Other improvements in Nextcloud Groupware:

• Mail signatures and encryption with S/Mime
• Mail: Add OCS API endpoint to send emails with automation
• Mail: print out email
• Mail: fix misplaced action menus
• Mail: fire workflow events for incoming messages
• Mail: API to read mails
• Mail: simplified domain registration for Mailvelope
• Mail: Fileviewer application
• Allow enforcing strict email format
• Contacts: migrate from Webpack to Vue
• Contacts: migrate from Webpack to Vite for faster loading
• Contacts: birthday and biography support for the system address book
• Calendar: set start day of the week
• Calendar: improve sidebar display of calendars
• Calendar: auto refresh
• CalDAV: invitations for shared calendars
• CalDAV: fix unclear event update email for recurring events
• DAV: hide CalDAV settings if no calendar-dependent apps are enabled
• Calendar/CalDAV: delta sync for subscriptions and adaptive sync rates
• CalDAV: send invitation emails via Nextcloud Mail

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.

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.

Other improvements in Nextcloud clients:

• Improved handling of multi-monitor setups on macOS
• Desktop client: Multiple Proxy Settings.
• Login Flow v2 on Android and iOS.
• Ability to enforce Windows-compatible file names on the server.
• Improve notifications of file changes from notify_push server app.

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.

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 🤹

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

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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