Nextcloud Hub 3 introduces new design, Photos 2.0 with editor and AI, polls and widgets

Post date

October 1, 2022

Categories

Press releases

Author

Jos Poortvliet

Third incarnation of the popular collaboration platform improves accessibility and personalisation with new design, delivers 30% faster loading and intelligent Related Resources

Berlin, October 1 2022 – Live at the yearly Nextcloud Conference in Berlin, Nextcloud GmbH, the company behind the worlds’ most deployed on-premises content collaboration platform, announces major improvements for the third release of Nextcloud Hub.

Nextcloud Hub 3 has a major focus on digital wellbeing. It introduces a fresh design that gives users more room for personalisation and better accessibility, a number of features that help filter the digital noise of the modern work space and features that facilitate quick and easy access to the data users need. In line with the Nextcloud focus on privacy and efficiency, this release also delivers impressive performance and security improvements.

The third release of Hub is a culmination of 2 years of effort, influenced by major world events and movements in the industry. Demand for more secure, compliant collaboration has inspired us to build an amazing platform, together with our community, customers and partners. We are proud and thankful to have become market leader in on-premises collaboration, with Nextcloud Hub bringing a new leap in remote productivity.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder Nextcloud GmbH

In response to great demand from our user base, Photos has seen significant work. The 2.0 release introduces a new design and much improved performance, plus:

AI-powered automatic face and object recognition
Albums for collaboration with other users
Nice public link view of Albums
Built-in photo uploader
An advanced, built-in photo editor with filters and common edit operations

Object recognition uses a neural network that runs on the server, and does not send any data to third parties.

Nextcloud Talk comes with new features to improve digital wellbeing, allowing users to start calls or send messages that do not generate notifications and an automatic do-not-disturb feature. In a chat room, pasted links can transform into widgets that give a rich view on tasks from Deck cards, links to videos, website links and more. Talk also introduces:

Polls
Message expiration
More granular chat permissions
Disable calling functionality by user or group
SIP dial-in improvements

Finally, the team updated clustering support to enable wider deployment in large scale enterprise environments.

Mail 2.0 debuts a much-improved performance and updated user interface with easily accessible quick actions, mail content preview in the sidebar, a streamlined account setup wizard and integrated support for replying to calendar invitations. Viewer integration enables users to view attachments without having to save the file or leaving the Mail app and the out-of-office and signature settings have been improved. The calendar app introduces the duplication of events and improved appointment booking page.

The Contacts app introduces an organisational chart view. The organisation chart is built automatically from the “manager” property in the address book and shows user name, avatar and job title, plus the reporting organisation. The view supports zoom, pan and going back to the view of an individual person by clicking the user avatar.With growing concerns about the energy usage of data centres, improving the performance of Nextcloud servers has been a key concern for us. This release once again cuts database load and improves page load by 25-30%. — Jos Poortvliet, Director Marketing at Nextcloud

Security is a key concern for Nextcloud users. This release comes with improvements to our server-side and end-to-end encryption technologies.

Server-side encryption reduced data usage by 30% and introduces support for S3 primary storage and group folders.
The end-to-end encryption performance impact was reduced by 75% and key management for users was introduced together.
System administrators can now configure which users and clients are able to use end-to-end encryption.

Over 30 improvements to the Nextcloud core were made to improve performance. The load of some operations was reduced by 90% or more, adding up to a 20% faster propfind, one of the most common operations. Users will certainly notice that application loading time was reduced by 30%.

Work on intelligent features that anticipate users’ needs has continued. Adding to file and user recommendations, Nextcloud Hub 3 introduces Related Resources across Files, Talk, Deck and Calendar. This makes it easier and faster to access documents, chats and tasks the user is looking for.Ease of use and efficiency are key concerns for purchasing managers and with the introduction of Related Resources Nextcloud Hub 3 puts the bar higher than ever before. — Andreas Rode, CCO at Nextcloud

With this release also come major improvements in the mobile and desktop clients, bringing Nextcloud Dashboard widgets to mobile devices. This means Android and iOS users can add any number of Nextcloud Dashboard widgets to their phone screen, for example:

Recently updated status or changed files
recent chat messages or emails
List of notes

Android also introduces a new image gallery view while iOS introduces unified search, support for file locking, a new PDF viewer and Files view, updated share view and more. The windows client is introducing thumbnails for virtual files in Windows next to a host of smaller improvements.

To improve interoperability with other platforms, Nextcloud works closely with other companies in the collaboration space. This release debuts deeper integration with Zimbra, Cisco Webex, NUITEQ Stage and OpenProject and updates to the Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive integrations, with other integration projects in progress.Nextcloud is used in a wide range of environments, creating a need for interoperability with other software. The open source strategy of Nextcloud uniquely positions it to deliver on those needs and offer integration with solutions from other vendors. — Daphne Muller, Manager alliances, ecosystem & support at Nextcloud

Nextcloud Hub 3 is now available as release candidate and the final release is expected later this month.

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud Hub is the industry-leading, fully open source, on-premises team productivity platform, combining the easy user interface of consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud Hub brings together universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting them under direct control of IT and integrated with existing infrastructure.

Nextcloud’s easy and quick deployment, open, modular architecture and emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing file storage assets within and across the borders of their organisation. For more information, visit nextcloud.com or follow @nextclouders on Twitter.