Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer: collaboration bringing Euro-Office to the desktop

• With Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer, Nextcloud brings the sovereign, open source office suite Euro-Office to the desktop for the first time, giving organizations a real alternative to Microsoft Office.

• The release also shows how Nextcloud’s ecosystem strategy is paying off, with several of the release’s most important improvements built together with within an ecosystem comprising partners and the community.

Nextcloud, the leading European platform provider for digital collaboration, today released Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer. At the center of the release is the desktop version of Euro-Office, the European Open Source office suite that gives organizations a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office. The release also reflects how, over the past year, Nextcloud has been building more of the product together with partners, customers and the open source community.

A sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office, on the desktop

Until now, Nextcloud Office users working with Euro-Office have done so in the browser. With Hub 26 Summer, a dedicated desktop application joins that option, letting people edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations locally while keeping their files securely connected to Nextcloud. For organizations and individuals who prefer a traditional desktop experience, this closes one of the last gaps between Euro-Office and Microsoft Office, without handing control of their data to a non-European vendor. Office also got noticeably faster in this release, with improved filtering and document thumbnails making it quicker to find and open the right file.

Euro-Office is developed together with IONOS, Open-Xchange, Office.eu and other European partners, alongside a growing community of contributors. Much of the work on the desktop client itself came from the community, another example of the project’s momentum since its launch earlier this year. While the contributors and supporters of Euro-Office are Europe-based, the open source solution is open to contributions worldwide and available globally.

“Europe needs a reliable and independent office solution that can compete with established providers on equal terms. This has been our goal ever since we co-initiated the Euro-Office Initiative. For an alternative office solution to be successful, it must work in day-to-day working life and be just as easy to use as existing solutions. The new desktop client for Euro-Office is the next logical step in this process”, said Patrick Schaudel, Chief Product Officer SMB Solutions of IONOS.

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and Founder of Nextcloud, said: “With the Euro-Office desktop app, we’re giving people and organizations a real, sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office, not just in the browser, but exactly where many of them still work every day: on their own computer. Choice is a core part of digital sovereignty. It isn’t only about where your data lives, it’s also about which tools you get to work with, and being able to make that choice yourself.”

Built together: the ecosystem delivers

Earlier this year, Nextcloud announced it would put more structure behind its collaboration with independent software vendors, partners and the community. Hub 26 Summer is a visible result of that shift: a growing share of the release’s most important improvements were built together with the organizations that use the software every day, rather than by Nextcloud alone.

That collaboration takes different forms across the ecosystem. Dataport, a public-sector IT service provider, is providing direct feedback to Nextcloud engineers for the new Teams functionality, which gives project groups their own shared workspace.

At the same time, developers at SURF, the Dutch collaborative organization for education and research, directly contributed the new browsable room finder for calendar resource booking.

The same approach can be seen in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, where public administration runs a large number of specialist procedures (“Fachverfahren”) on Nextcloud Tables. Their teams needed a way to evolve a table’s structure, for example adding columns or changing views, without rebuilding the process running on top of it. Working with Nextcloud engineers, that requirement became a new structure import feature: an existing table can adopt a new structure while keeping its data intact, so processes can keep evolving instead of being rebuilt from scratch.

Across Nextcloud Groupware apps, Calendar, Mail and Contacts, more than half of this release’s improvements came from community contributors. Anna Larch, Developer Relations Lead at Nextcloud, said: “What you see in this release is the result of months of close collaboration with our community and our partners. Whether it’s features shaped together with organizations like Dataport and SURF, or code contributed by individual developers in the community, our ecosystem isn’t just giving feedback, it’s actively building the product with us. That’s exactly what we set out to make possible.”

Availability

Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer is available starting today, the Euro-Office desktop app will be available to download in the next few weeks. More details on the release are being presented in a launch livestream.

More information on the improvements in the launch blog: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub26-summer. 

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud is the world’s most popular privacy-focused collaboration platform. It is used by tens of thousands of private and public organizations and tens of millions of private individuals to stay in control of their sensitive data and ensure privacy compliance.

With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold video conferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. The open source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. It runs on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.

Founded in 2016, Nextcloud is fully employee-owned and has grown organically ever since. Learn more at www.nextcloud.com.

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