Nextcloud is an on-premises, integrated collaboration platform that can work for your organization or business in all sectors from Government, education, healthcare, and many other.

Meet Nextcloud at exciting upcoming trade shows from Zukunftskongress and DMEA in Berlin to EdTech Congress Barcelona in Spain where the Nextcloud team will showcase the latest Nextcloud Hub 4 release and much more.

Join us at the following events!

EdTech – Learning in the age of AI

The EdTech conference in Barcelona facilitates the education and government sectors to be up to date with the research in educational technology.

Barcelona, Spain

April 19-20

For national and international educational leaders, management of universities and educational centers, EDTech companies, and managers of public administration

Nextcloud is fit for Universities

Learn how Meiji University in Japan utilizes Nextcloud to their advantage in the case study.

DMEA – Connecting Digital Health

Do you work in healthcare?

Join us in Berlin’s exhibition hall to learn how your organization can benefit from Nextcloud in safekeeping patient’s data and storing confidential files securely.

Berlin, Germany

April 25-27

For managers and decision-makers in the digital healthcare industry

Hospitals trust Nextcloud

See how ZGT Hospital in the Netherlands benefits from Nextcloud in the case study.

Plan ahead for more events!

Zukunftskongress

The Zukunftskongress or “Congress of the Future” is hosting its 9th annual conference with a focus on governance of digital transformation. Keynote speakers will be current prime ministers, federal ministers, and ministers of state in Germany.

Berlin, Germany

June 19-21

For executives in business and science industries from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland

Nextcloud is secure for governments

Find out how the City of Geneva deployed Nextcloud.

The post Meet Nextcloud at upcoming trade shows in Germany and Spain! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Sharing of knowledge and data is the bedrock of any scientific or research community. Data needs to be sharable among peers so different communities can work together in a collaborative fashion. As important as access to data, equally important is access control; who can or can’t access this data. This has been a big challenge for organization who work together and collaborate online.

ZECM, the IT service center of the Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) offers tubCloud to the users of TU Berlin and several members of DFN (Deutsches Forschungsnetz), a collaboration of universities and research institutions in German.

tubCloud is a file sync and storage solution that’s based on Nextcloud, an open source enterprise file sync and storage project. It’s a competitor to services like Dropbox, which protects users privacy and ownership of data. tubCloud offers standard functionalities that users would expect from commercial services like Dropbox, including data storage and synchronization, online music playback, picture gallery and more. But unlike those other services, data stays at the TU Berlin, under control of its system administrators, under German law.

Based on Nextcloud

When evaluating available solutions in 2011, TU Berlin chose ownCloud due to its ability to meet most of their requirements. However, after the contract with ownCloud expired in May 2017, the team decided to migrate tubCloud from ownCloud 9.1 to Nextcloud 11. Today, TubCloud is powered by Nextcloud Hub 3, version 24, empowering TU Berlin’s students and faculty with advanced collaboration and file-sharing capabilities.

After migrating from ownCloud 9.1 to Nextcloud 11, tubCloud experienced significant performance improvements, resulting in over 38% lower database load during peak times and faster service for its users. The migration also led to the implementation of better security practices and introduced new features to tubCloud.

Today, tubCloud, powered by Nextcloud, serves over 70,000 users across 35 instances and manages hundred millions of files. “Most of these files are small 1kb – 2kb files, but these are critical files – text files, which could be research articles, meeting protocols, sample data from research and what not. Then there are bigger files that take up couple of gigabytes, in most cases these are raw data from research instruments,” said Dr. Thomas Hildmann, head of the infrastructure department at tubIT and chairman of the DFN forum cloud-services. At the moment Nextcloud is helping tubCloud manage over 0.8 PB (PetaByte) of data from these DFN members.

Sharing is caring

Sharing of this data with other universities and teams within the same organization is critical to DFN members. It allows them to work together and collaborate. At the same time, Germany has some of the strongest data privacy laws in the world, so tubCloud needs to maintain the balance between sharing and privacy. Nextcloud Hub also has these two functionalities – ability to share, and total control over privacy – baked in at its core. They are offering privacy and collaboration features that are not found in even the most popular commercial software, for example advanced sharing and end-to-end encryption. Teams can offer fine grained access control to files, such as expiration of sharing after a certain time, or restrict access in certain regions.

All of that above, while keeping things simple. “When a new team is created, Nextcloud creates a team folder that’s shared with every member that the admin adds to that team. Each member gets the same UI and experience,” said Hildmann. “At the moment, 90% users use file or folder sharing. That’s the most used feature here and it’s very important for our users to have their files synced with multiple computers”

tubCloud Apps

Meanwhile, the Nextcloud community is actively developing new features and functionalities for Nextcloud Hub, some of which have been incorporated into tubCloud for the benefit of its users. These new features include online collaboration tools, audio and video chat, group chat, and project management capabilities, which are currently being used by DFN-Cloud users.

Online Collaboration

tubCloud has built-in support for plain text editing features. But users can achieve a Google Docs like experience. TU Berlin has been working with Collabora Productivity and some research partners to offer a Google Docs/Office 365 like online collaborative service to tubCloud users. While some research partners will start using Collabora Online, along with Nextcloud in January, TU Berlin plans to start it later this year, as they have to conduct extensive testing before it’s deployed to serve more than 30,000 users.

tubCloud has built-in support for basic text editing features. However, for a more comprehensive online collaborative experience similar to Google Docs or Office 365, TU Berlin has integrated OnlyOffice and Collabora Productivity into tubCloud to provide their users with a robust online collaborative service.

Project Management

tubCloud offers a tightly integrated project management solution to its users through Nextcloud Deck, an app that is fully integrated within the Nextcloud Hub stack and supported by Nextcloud. Deck is heavily used by tubCloud users for project planning and team meetings, making it an important tool for collaboration and productivity.

Infrastructure tubCloud

There are two important aspects of the tubCloud infrastructure to mention: first, the use of their own-developed storage file system called tubFS; and second, the use of OpenStack to manage the cloud environments for Nextcloud Hub. We will be diving into these topics in more detail now.

tubFS

TU Berlin is currently using their own storage file system called tubFS, which is based on the open source CEPH FS project. One of the primary reasons for building tubFS is to address use cases where a sync client is not feasible, such as in terminals where the virtual machine is respawned when a user logs out. In such scenarios, users are unable to access tubCloud data, but tubFS provides a solution by allowing users to access data from the front end using Nextcloud or Samba share. It is planned to integrate tubCloud with tubFS so that regardless of the device used to access it, users will always see a data directory that looks the same.

OpenStack

TU Berlin migrated their infrastructure to OpenStack, which allows them to create and manage scalable, secure, and flexible cloud environments that are compatible with multiple technologies. The university’s goal is to create a centralized platform where all members of TU Berlin/DFN can access their files, collaborate with each other, and utilize various features such as collaborative editing, file sharing, chat, and more.

Future plans

We have several plans in store for tubCloud, and one of our top priorities is implementing encryption. Following our successful migration to OpenStack, we have end-to-end encryption on our roadmap and plan to introduce it soon.

End to End Encryption

tubCloud users may require strong encryption for private or sensitive data that is mandated by law in certain use cases. In addition to the existing on-storage encryption which is usefull in scenarios of third-party storage provider, Nextcloud has developed an industry-first solution for full end-to-end encryption. This solution allows users to choose any number of folders for complete end-to-end security, a feature that is not offered by even popular platforms like Dropbox. TU Berlin is considering implementing this end-to-end encryption solution in tubCloud for highly sensitive data. Doing so would be a significant milestone for tubCloud and its users.

Sharing Experience and Knowledge

ZECM, the IT service center of Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin), is eager to learn from other organizations that use Nextcloud Hub at scale. The university welcomes feedback and ideas from the community, and encourages further collaboration on this topic.

In the meantime, Thomas Hildmann would like to highlight an upcoming webinar on scaling Nextcloud that will be jointly offered by TU Berlin and Nextcloud. In this webinar, Thomas will provide a detailed overview of the implementation and configuration of managing 35 instances for 50,000 users at the university. We invite anyone who is interested in this topic to sign up for the upcoming webinar.

This article is based on an article by Swapnil Bhartiya, originally published in German on cloudcomputing-insider.de, and has been updated with information from recent presentations by TU Berlin on this topic. You can find the original article here.

The post Collaborate and Innovate – How Nextcloud helps TU Berlin shape their cloud-based collaboration appeared first on Nextcloud.

Proprietary SaaS plaforms like Sharepoint and MS 365 have become major cash cows, and on-premises solutions get discontinued across the tech sector to force customers into vendor-locked clouds. Organizations dealing with critical or sensitive data respond by looking to maintain their strategic autonomy by deploying on premises solutions. In collaboration with a number of European government organizations, the market leader in the open source, on-premises collaboration space today announces the expansion of it’s offering to provide a full SharePoint replacement, complete with migration services. Showing the strong trend towards digital sovereignty, the announcement comes shortly after the highest EU Data Protection authority, the EDPS, announced they deploy and recommend Nextcloud.

We believe that development based on real world requirements and demand, rather than a strategy of forcing customers into a vendor lock-in, results in better products. Demand for an open, on-premises structured data platform as part of Nextcloud has been huge, and several customers have already signed up to deploy our technology.

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH

The imminent end of SharePoint Server support has created a huge demand for solutions that offer similar functionality without compromising user control over data and meta data. The risks around data sovereignty and vendor lock-in is particularly pronounced for government agencies, many of which for reasons of autonomy, cost and compliance, tend to rely on on-premises tools for collaboration and document management.

A number of customers from the public sector has worked with Nextcloud to integrate a structured data management application into Nextcloud Hub. German state Schleswig-Holstein already announced their intention to replace SharePoint with Nextcloud in 2020 and since then several government organizations have already committed to the platform. Even more are providing feedback and information on their requirements with an eye to adopting Nextcloud as their on-premises SharePoint replacement.

Nextcloud’s initiative to offer a digitally sovereign, open-source alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint is to be welcomed. That’s why we work together with Nextcloud to optimize Nextcloud Tables.

Ralf Sutorius, Leitender IT-Architekt, Stadt Köln

Nextcloud Hub is well established as a collaboration platform, providing easy document collaboration and sharing for teams and work groups, as well as integrated knowledge management. The introduction of Tables rounds the platform out with management of structured data. It allows customers to build, manage and work with data structures, putting together easy ‘apps’ and connecting them to various other components in Nextcloud for automation.

Users will be able to create a table to track any other type of data that is relevant to their organization, such as expenses, projects or sales leads. The flexibility of Tables allows users to tailor the table to their specific needs.

The first release of Tables is available now on the Nextcloud app store.

The post EU Governments bet on Nextcloud to replace SharePoint appeared first on Nextcloud.

The European Data Protection Supervisor is an independent organisation responsible for monitoring and ensuring EU institutions respect the right to privacy and data protection of citizens. A year ago, in a report on personal information management systems, the EDPS already mentioned Nextcloud as an example of a great solution to manage personal, privacy sensitive data in a responsible way.

Today we are proud to tell you that the EDPS have themselves deployed Nextcloud, and even more, are working with our partner TAS Cloud Services to make it available to all EU institutions! This means the EU now has a powerful, complete collaboration platform that is compliant with EU’s data protection laws and not just endorsed, but used and offered by the EU’s independent data protection supervisor. Let us quote the European Data Protection Supervisor himself, Mr. Wojciech Wiewiórowski:

Open Source Software offers data protection-friendly alternatives to commonly used large-scale cloud service providers that often imply the transfer of individuals’ personal data to non-EU countries. Solutions like this may therefore minimise reliance on monopoly providers and detrimental vendor lock-in. By negotiating a contract with an EU-based provider of cloud services, the EDPS is delivering on its commitments, as set out in its 2020-2024 Strategy, to support EUIs in leading by example to safeguard digital rights and process data responsibly.”

Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS

As many of you know, many EU government organisations like in Sweden, France and Germany who are concerned with privacy and security, have been recommending and deploying Nextcloud for years. It is great to see the highest privacy compliance authority in the EU lead this effort now!

The EDPS has deployed Nextcloud to “share share files, send messages, make video calls, and allows collaborative drafting, in a secured cloud environment.” (emphasis in original quote). To enable the adoption of Nextcloud in the EU, the EDPS worked with us at Nextcloud and our great Partner TAS Cloud Services to improve the integration of Nextcloud with EU login, the European Commission’s user authentication service. The EDPS and TAS Cloud Services will offer other EU institutions, bodies and agencies the same solution as was deployed at EDPS.

That means any EU institute, from the court of justice to the parliament, can now easily have a secure, easy to use, and fully compliant communication and collaboration platform. There is no more need to risk data sovereignty by relying on non-EU cloud platforms!

Nextcloud offers the easiest way to achieve control and digital sovereignty over data and communication for organizations that deal with sensitive or business critical content. As an open source, on-premises collaboration platform it offers transparency and control no non-EU SaaS plaform can deliver. Quoting from the EDPS press release:

By procuring the Open Source Software from one single entity in the EU, the use of sub-processors is avoided. In doing so, the EDPS avoids data transfers to non-EU countries and allows for a more effective control over the processing of personal data.

Interested parties can contact Nextcloud or our partner TAS Cloud Services to deploy a proof of concept of the collaboration platform the EDPS has deployed.

The post EU data protection supervisor sets the standard for data protection with Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

In this blog, we inform you about the Swedish government organization who advocates against the mainstream platform, Zoom, and why they’re pushing for more open source solutions like Nextcloud.

eSam Advises Against Zoom

eSam is a digitalization organization for the Swedish government that comprises of 34 central government organizations. Together, they identified and analyzed collaboration platforms based on open source and open standards. Based on their findings, they provided the government advice in their exclusive report.

In eSam’s most recent report, they advise against government’s use of Zoom.

The conclusion is based off a comprehensive assessment of Zoom which identified and examined key risks to the platform and service agreement. These include data that may be made available to US cloud service providers, aggregation risk, End-to-End encryption issues and much more.

Government entities have far too much sensitive and confidential data to put their institution or its citizens at any form of risk.

Swedish government recommends Nextcloud

In a previous report from 2021, eSam recommends Nextcloud as a premier solution for digital collaboration including file storage and kanban. eSam claims Nextcloud meets their requirements due to Nextcloud being an actively managed solution, providing a wide range of features and applications and its ability to be hosted on its own IT infrastructure and data centers. They were also intrigued by the option of a Swedish supplier implementing Nextcloud, as the organization advocates for public services to only use Swedish cloud services to handle confidential information.

There is a great deal to be said in hosting in your own data center, or on a server managed by you on-premises. It entails 100% control over your data and 100% compliance satisfied. You can even have on-premises video conferencing and chat with Talk – Nextcloud’s compliant, online meeting platform that beats Zoom out the park.

Nextcloud Talk: Your video, chats and data are secure

Nextcloud Talk is the secure, open source alternative where you can host and participate in online meetings with your security in check. Unlike Zoom’s extraordinary data leak history, Nextcloud Talk reduces risk of leakage due to all data being held safely on your own server.

Talk is made for communication – whether that’s private, group or public video calls or chats. It enables all essential features and functionalities including integrated screensharing, collaboration through file sharing, whiteboards and more while prioritizing security and confidentiality more than any other platform.

Nextcloud Talk security features:

• Multi-layered encryption
• Brute force protection
• Video verification options
• Access, authentification and privacy permissions
• AI based suspicious login detection
• Backing of Security Big Bounty Program (Worth $10,000)
• GDPR compliant

Sweden forges future of digitilization

Sweden is one European country at the forefront of digitilization and confronting change in the industry monopolized by Big Tech. The Swedish government just announced the launch of a 4-year digitalization plan to transform the country’s public sector.

Several government entities have already chosen Nextcloud as their secure file storage and collaboration platform. The Swedish Aviation – National Air Traffic Management with partner Iver Sverige AB, and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Forsakringskassan) with partners Kafit and Atea are proud Nextcloud users. Other enterprises and organizations in Sweden from schools to businesses are also deploying Nextcloud.

As reported by WIRED, the “Zoom Boom” is over, and if you don’t take it from us, take it from the Swedish government’s highly trusted IT partner eSam: Zoom is effectively an untrustworthy solution for protecting your data concerning their fuzzy policies on third-party agreements, past data leak scandals and the unbeknownst risk of what could come next.

Regain control over your data with Nextcloud and immediately tick security with a .

The post Swedish government advises against Zoom: “Sensitive information is at risk” appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud Office is comprised of Write, Spreadsheet, Present, Draw and Text. Nextcloud Write is dedicated to document writing and editing, Spreadsheet for creating all-encompassing spreadsheets, Present for slide creation and presentations, Draw for brainstorming through sketches, diagrams and graphics and Text for quick note-taking.

Collaborative editing

Within Nextcloud Office, you can collaborate with colleagues through editing and interacting in the way that works best for you. Work solo and track the edits you made, which shows up in a different color for the author to easily digest. Work together remotely and silently with real-time editing and commenting also in multiple colors. Or work together in a virtual video call and simultaneously edit a document.

What’s more is that everything is done in a single platform. Forget about opening a new application – Office documents, presentations and spreadsheets can all be viewed and edited directly in your Nextcloud.

• Edit documents in real-time with multiple other editors
• Insert and reply to comments
• Invite others without a Nextcloud account for anonymous editing of files – using a public link shared folder!

An integrated office suite

One of the cutting edge features about Nextcloud Office is its strong integration capabilities. Office is integrated with the rest of your Nextcloud including Files, Photos, Talk and more so they can be used interoperably. For instance, you can:

• Insert images directly into a doc/spreadsheet/presentation from your Nextcloud
• Share a document into a chat room for editing with the participants, and start an audio or video call while editing
• Share internal and external links with protective access options
• Edit documents from the attachment of a task, calendar item, in the chat room, and many other places in Nextcloud

On the right hand side of a document, spreadsheet or presentation, the media tab or sidebar opens the door to tracking activity, chatting, commenting, a multitude of sharing capabilities, and monitoring versions.

How to install

1. Setup a Collabora Online server

Nextcloud Office is built on Collabora Online which requires a dedicated service running next to Nextcloud. There are several ways of running this service:

Nextcloud All In One: Nextcloud Office comes preinstalled out-of-the-box in the Nextcloud All In One setup and provides easy deployment and maintenance with most features included in this one Nextcloud instance.

Installation through distribution packages: There are packages for all major Linux distributions available which allow deploying a Collabora Online server through installing it through the regular package management. For an example installation guide on Ubuntu, see: Installation example on Ubuntu 20.04.

Installation through Docker: Docker images are available for deploying the Collabora Online server in container environments. For a detailed step by step guide, see: Installation example with Docker.

Built-in CODE server: The built-in code server is a Nextcloud app that allows you to run without additional server setup and provides all document editing features of Collabora Online. It’s easy to install and is meant for personal use or small teams. However, it is a bit slower than a stand alone server without the advanced scalability features. Installation can be performed by enabling the Nextcloud app. Further details can be found in the app documentation.

In most scenarios, running a dedicated Collabora Online server will require some sort of reverse proxy to be setup in front of it. For more details see Reverse proxy.

2. Enable the Nextcloud Office app

Navigate to your Nextcloud instances app management and enable the “Nextcloud Office” app.

3. Connect the Nextcloud Office app to the Collabora Online server

To connect your servers, you will need to enter the URL of the Collabora Online server in the Nextcloud Office settings. After clicking save, you can start using Nextcloud Office. For building the CODE-Server, you don’t need to enter a URL, just tick the “Use the built-in CODE server” option.

The only data private office

In today’s online office world, your privacy is at risk more than anything. Confidential information, documents, and data can’t just be locked up in a file cabinet anymore. All data is constantly vulnerable to hacking, non-encrypted systems, threats, leaking and more. There is no guarantee of protecting your data unless you use a self-hosted office where it remains on your server at all times. With Nextcloud Office, your private information, groundbreaking ideas or business strategies are safe and secure.

How does Nextcloud Office compare?

Nextcloud Office is built together with Collabora Online, a LibreOffice-based office suite and has all the functionalities of other popular office platforms plus more. See how certain features and functionalities compare:

Similar blog posts:

How to Install CollaboraOnline in Nextcloud Hub

How to Install ONLYOFFICE in Nextcloud Hub

Rate Nextcloud Office!

Nextcloud Reviews

The post How to Install Nextcloud Office appeared first on Nextcloud.

It’s no wonder companies today are faced with so many different solutions, as people turning to home office has resulted in explosive growth of new innovations used in modern organizations worldwide. To combat the issue of too many choices, many companies have decided to consolidate all tools and applications into a single, productivity platform.

The single platform has become a one-stop-shop for all your work life: your files, contacts, collaboration efforts and more. This IT innovation saves on cost, improves security and productivity of employees.

In this blog, we will explain the factors influencing companies and governments to choose integrated productivity platforms like Nextcloud over an assortment of individual tools.

Costs

There is a financial cost associated with using multiple platforms for work productivity. Let’s take a look at what some popular platforms are charging businesses and how Nextcloud, a single, integrated platform, compares, from a reputable hosting partner, Deutsche Telekom:

As you can see, when businesses choose to use multiple different platforms, costs will add up significantly. Luckily, this is entirely avoidable with a single productivity platform that is an all-in-one. For a fraction of the cost, you can have all the tools you need for your employees. That goes without noting Nextcloud is entirely open source, avoiding vendor lock-in and protecting your customers’s data privacy.

But there is more to the cost. In most organizations, purchasing a SaaS service or another is a very easy and informal process. And with all those vendors you end up with, getting an overview of what you spend IT budget on is nearly impossible. It is no wonder that studies show over 1/3rd of SaaS spending is wasted. Much of that is due to subscriptions on apps that are no longer used, for employees who left the company, and so on. But here’s the trick: having less vendors means it is easier to get control over your spending!

Now let’s talk about the next benefit, productivity.

Productivity

Switching between different user interfaces all day may seem like second nature, but it adds up in more ways than one. As stated in the Harvard Business Review study, research in psychology and neuroscience have shown that jumping between tasks — also called “context switching” — is cognitively taxing. It slows you down, derails your focus causing more opportunities for errors and ultimately decreases your daily work productivity.

Take this example: You’ve finally finished a project with an important customer and you’re ready to show the final report to your manager. However, you can’t remember where your final report is located. Did you upload it onto Dropbox? Or was it in that long email chain? Or rather, did your colleague put it on his daughter’s USB stick while he was working from home? As you can see, a file can get lost quite easily if you don’t have one dedicated place for it, not to mention the communication and workflow involving the file. In Nextcloud’s single platform, your file is stored where you left it – in one folder.

Not only is everything in one place making things easier, but tools are integrated. Back to our example, once you’re in a video call to show your manager your final report, you can simply share the file right into the conversation. With Nextcloud Talk, you can share any file, document or spreadsheet in a chat or video call. Forgetting your final report’s location is a problem simply in the past.

More examples of Nextcloud’s interoperability are:

• Sharing a document within the document itself in the media tab where you can even configure restricted access if necessary
• Sharing a document directly in a Talk video call or chat
• Sharing a document in an appointment in Calendar so it’s readily available for all parties
• Sharing a document in a Deck card to better collaborate

Your collaboration possibilities are truly endless when you never have to leave the platform.

Security

In just the first half of 2022, there have been 236.1 million ransomware attacks worldwide. Given this incredible rise of ransomware attacks, it’s vital for your organization or company to take protective action. Using 5 different applications means 5x the risk of a breach, and often, due to password re-use or single-sign-on, a breach in one spreads to the others. So, using a single collaboration platform decreases the security risks of an organisation or company.

As a Nextcloud Enterprise user, you have access to early security and stability patches and if you host on-premises or in a local data center, it’s all under your control too. No need to wait for a third party to inform you of the breach or hope they act competently.

Ease of maintenance

Each platform you run or use has to be managed and maintained. And especially when you host them yourself, you need to have and maintain the inhouse expertise to run the system. Certainly, running a Java, PHP, Go and Node.JS each require different skills to maintain, security reports to keep up to date with and so on. Besides the different down time schedules this would result in, scaling is another concern: each of these technologies scales in a different way, horizontally or vertically, and has different bottlenecks (CPU, memory, bandwidth and so on).

Certainly, having such a heterogenous environment might be fun for sysadmin. But it won’t be for the rest of the organisation, at least in terms of cost, security and long term stability. And when a problem shows up and the different products and their support teams all point fingers to each other rather than taking responsibility and fixing the problem, even the system administrator will lose interest…

While Nextcloud uses various technologies where it makes sense, including Rust, Go, PHP and C++, it is a well understood and designed whole, scaling consistently. We take responsibility for the entire product, saving cost and improving reliability.

A trend just begun

Integrated, single platforms like Nextcloud are just at the beginning of a trend that’s really just begun. Larger companies like Microsoft and Google have already been working towards single platforms for years because they see the benefits for their customers and cost advantages. Even one-product companies like Zoom are now looking towards expanding into an entire “Zoomtopia” complete with mail and calendar.

But are those separate solutions not better?

Often you’ll hear: pick the best tool for the job. And yes, will Calendly have, somewhere tucked in a corner, a feature you won’t find in an integrated solution from Microsoft, Google or Nextcloud? Perhaps.

Certainly, not all software is the same, and for a feature you lose left, you gain another on the right. But the benefit of an improved user experience often outweighs the occasional feature difference, certainly for less technical users. Is it worth the additional security risk, additional administrative overhead, maintenance work and cost?

If you rely on multiple platforms for their product just because they are “the expert” on their product, you might want to think again. By using a single platform, you save in cost, increase productivity, can rely on high security and maintenance.

What our users have to say

Our users have experienced first-hand what a single platform can do for their business. Read on to see what some of them say about how Nextcloud meets and exceeds their productivity, security and maintenance goals.

“Collabora, Nextcloud Talk, News, Announcement Center is what bounds me within the software. I don’t have to use different applications to communicate with my colleagues, don’t need different applications to sync my files, don’t need different applications to read my atom feeds, etc. You know where I’m going. Nextcloud is the complete set of application. It has indeed replaced Dropbox, Google Drive, Zoom, Google RSS Reader, and tons of other software from my life.”

Diggaj U., reviewer on Capterra

One of the reasons Sam T. chose Nextcloud for his business was because of the large app ecosystem.

“Its easy to use, stable and dependable, extremely customisable, and works across all mobile and desktop operating systems. Perhaps most importantly, through the built in app store, it serves as a platform for many other key business applications which we need, such as collaborative document editing, calendar and contact sync and share, internal knowledge base (wiki), and more.”

Sam T., reviewer on Capterra

“It’s a brilliant way of sharing files across multiple devices and sharing files with others. I was looking for my own version of Dropbox and Nextcloud fits the bill, and some. Some of the more recent Apps really could make this a complete solution, with the Collarora/Onlyoffice integration, Decks, Circles, Passwords, Email, Talk, etc. And it’s open source.”

Adrian W., reviewer on Capterra

How do you use Nextcloud to better collaborate? What does it mean for you to work on a single platform?

We’d love to hear from you – write a comment below or review us today on one of the many rating platforms that support our product and service.

We hope you enjoyed this article about why using a single platform is more productive and efficient by ten-fold!

Nextcloud Reviews

The post Why a Single Platform boosts productivity and improves security appeared first on Nextcloud.

2 major releases: Nextcloud Hub 2 & 3

This year, Nextcloud announced 2 major releases of Hub 2 in May and Hub 3 in September.

Nextcloud Hub 2 introduced reactions and a media tab in Nextcloud Talk, undo and schedule sending email functionalities, as well as performance and scalability improvements in the back-end of Nextcloud Files.

Nextcloud Hub 3 was an even greater step forward where we announced our stunning new design, accessibility options and a bunch of new features to improve your digital well-being.

• Nextcloud Photos 2.0: Photo editor, AI powered face and object recognition, tile view, album sharing and more!
• Nextcloud Groupware: Mail 2.0 with improved performance and updated user interface. Contacts introduces organizational chart view
• Nextcloud Talk: Polls, pasted links become widgets, more options –> more details in our blog!
• Nextcloud Clients: updates available for Desktop, Android and iOS clients

One of our greatest releases yet, we hope it’s brought you joy, productivity and a healthier work life balance.

CloudComputing-Insider Awards winner

For the 2nd time in a row, Nextcloud won 1st prize in the Cloud Content Management category of the CloudComputing-Insider Awards. The vote came from approximately 70,000 IT professionals and left behind Microsoft and Dropbox.

We’re very proud of this and we’d like to thank everyone who made this possible, that is, all of you! Especially all of you who voted, but also everyone else who consistently helps spread the word or improve Nextcloud directly with code, documentation, or helping other users on our forums. Every bit makes a difference!

Enterprise Day x2

Nextcloud held 2 Enterprise Days this year – in June and October – for our valued customers. Both events had a great turnout, led to interesting discussions and inspired the Nextcloud team to bring you even better features and functionalities for the future. If you got the opportunity to attend this year, thank you for your participation and those who missed it, we will announce next years soon!

In-person Nextcloud Conference

At the beginning of October, Nextcloud hosted its first in-person conference since 2019. Held over the weekend, we welcomed keynote speakers Maik Außendorf from the German Bundestag and digital rights and data privacy experts Felix Reda and Renata Ávila. From there were 2 panel sessions, 26 lightning talks and 4 workshops!

It was so wonderful seeing many of you in person this year and hope you had a great time meeting new people, listening to all the insightful talks and hacking with old friends.

Hackathon with the European Commission

In April and May this year, Nextcloud and the European Commission held the NextGov Hackathon that brought together 60 participants from 33 countries. There were 5 prize winners with 1st place going to a collaborative maps app by a participant from Germany.

Thank you to all the participants who contributed to our goal of building and protecting Europe’s digital sovereignty.

Check out all the winners here.

Success Stories

Dutch hospital ZGT

Dutch hospital ZGT is one of the first in the medical industry to achieve digital sovereignty with Nextcloud.

Read case study

Stadtsparkasse Munich

Nextcloud partner HKN has provided this Munich city bank with a secure, compliant collaboration platform.

Read case study

City of Geneva

Find out how the City of Genève aims to protect their digital sovereignty with this new case study.

Read case study

Digitally Sovereign Office

European Governments work with Nextcloud to build Digitally Sovereign Office

Read more

Role Model

The European Commission praises Nextcloud as a Role Model for the Open-Source Businesses

Read more

Nextcloud in Sweden

GDPR compliant collaboration coming to 750K students, teachers and researchers in Sweden

Read case study

Growing international team

This year has brought exciting growth to the Nextcloud team. We have hired 16 new employees to several departments and have developed our regional marketing team to reach greater audiences around the world.

Available in more languages!

We are excited to offer our reach to more people around the world through our website being available in 4 languages (German, French, Spanish and Italian) as well as introducing new social media channels in 8 different languages!

Follow us on

➤ Twitter:

• Spanish: @nextcloudesp
• Italy: @NextcloudItalia
• Brazil: @NextcloudBrazil
• France: @NextcloudFrance
• Japan: @NextcloudJapan
• Sweden: @NextcloudSweden
• Norway: @NextcloudNorway

➤ Facebook:

• Spanish: Nextcloud en Español
• Italian: Nextcloud Italia
• Brazil: Nextcloud Brasil

➤ Linkedin:

• Spanish: Nextcloud en Español
• Italian: Nextcloud Italia
• Brazil: Nextcloud Brasil
• France: Nextcloud France
• Germany: Nextcloud Deutschland
• Netherlands: Nextcloud Nederland

8 New Integrations and Partnerships

Shadow

Learn more

Rocket.Chat

Learn more

OpenProject

Learn more

MariaDB

Learn more

NUITEQ

Learn more

Webex

Learn more

Zimbra

Learn more

EU Government: Advisory Board

Learn more

Ciao 2022! See you in 2023!

2022 was one for the books. Thank you for being part of this journey with us, and see you in the New Year!

And remember, If you would like to receive more Nextcloud news regularly throughout the next year, subscribe to our Nextcloud Newsletter and keep an eye on our Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profile!

Cheers,

The Nextcloud Team

The post Nextcloud 2022 Wrap-Up! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Shadow is probably best known for their remote gaming PC platform described as “the only fully realized cloud gaming service out there” and “the definitive cloud gaming experience” by cloudwards. It boasted 100.000 gamers in 2020 and has extended its platform since being bought by OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba. Shadow is now announcing the immediate availability of the Nextcloud based Shadow Drive in all European countries where Shadow services operate. This includes France, UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark. Spain will launch on December 7th.

Shadow Drive will allow users to store their data while keeping it accessible from anywhere. Data will be accessible via its web interface and through Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS (still in Beta) applications.

Our ambition to liberate technology from its hardware limitations also passes through Shadow Drive, our cloud storage solution, with the help of our prestigious partner Nextcloud, a partnership for which I thank Frank. We are particularly excited about this joint European project

— Eric Sèle, CEO of SHADOW

Initially soft launched this summer, Shadow Drive already counts nearly 25 000 users ahead of its general launch. The service will also be available on December 7th in Spain, and in 2023 in North America.

Shadow is free for up to 20 GB of storage. And by free, they do not mean freemium: “our users’ data will never be sold or used, and we will never integrate ads”, shares Shadow. A premium version of the service offers storage up to 2 TB.

Check the Downloads page for more details. As for all SHADOW services, it’s a non-binding offer, and it’s independent of any Shadow PC subscription.

We live in an age where all of our digital life, all of our communications are now in the cloud, and most of it is hosted overseas. I have no desire to live in a world where five giants own all the files in the world. That’s why I’m excited that we work together with SHADOW, as our two companies share values of excellence, openness, and European sovereignty.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud

Shadow Drive is a European-owned and based service, meaning European users’ data will always remain in Europe, through European sovereign solutions.  You can discover more of what digital sovereignty means for Shadow and Nextcloud in a previous blog post.

The post Shadow first to connect remote PC technology with content collaboration appeared first on Nextcloud.