Nous vous recommandons vivement de mettre à jour votre Hub vers la version 26.0.12, 27.1.7 ou 28.0.3. Les mises à jour de maintenance comprennent d’importantes corrections de bugs, ainsi que des mises à niveau de stabilité et de sécurité. C’est un procédé rapide et sûr, comme toujours !

The post Les mises à jour de février pour Hub 4, 6 et 7 sont disponibles ici appeared first on Nextcloud.

6 years ago, Nextcloud was just a file-sync-and-share solution similar to Dropbox.

Today, we are a Content Collaboration Platform giving you a complete online productivity platform with integrated features from Talk, Office, Groupware and hundreds of apps.

Every day, you choose us to be your Content Collaboration Platform, and every year we provide you with product releases that make you more productive.

Today, we are excited to announce a major step forward with Hub 4 – the very first on-premises collaboration platform to integrate intelligent features across its applications.

The Nextcloud Hub 4 release comes at an exciting time, with the recent breakthrough of ChatGPT and AI technology being at the epicenter of mainstream news and consumer interest.

Now more than ever, businesses need to learn how to leverage the way they work with AI technologies to increase their productivity and collaboration.

At the same time, we are all too aware of the many failings of AI. Be it related to discrimination, privacy, ecological footprint or the generation of just plain nonsense, the challenges are numerous.

Our society is just beginning to comprehend the potential, impact and limitations of AI in the work world, however, while we digest this powerful technology, we’ve chosen to embrace it and take it a step forward, while taking our ethical obligations to you seriously.

Integrating AI into Nextcloud’s collaboration platform is going to transform the way you think, work and collaborate with others.

That is not all

But there is much, much more. We introduce beta apps for Talk on the desktop and Virtual Files on Mac OS. We introduce recording and breakout rooms in Talk, file attachments in Calendar, advanced versioning in Files, the new Tables app, we bring the Notes app into Nextcloud, make Deck more collaborative – the list is long. Please, read on, share your thoughts on this release with us in the comments or on social media and tell friends, colleagues and family that it is possible to have a great collaboration experience WITHOUT giving your data to Big Tech!

Intelligent features: Introducing the ‘Smart Picker’

The best way to introduce our new, intelligent features is through the Smart Picker – a cross-application feature enabling users to use AI (and much more) in their daily work flow.

For the first time, users have the opportunity to work with AI in a personal and collaborative way.

Note: In order to activate, you must upgrade to Hub 4 (Version 26) and install the integration apps.

With the Smart Picker, you can talk to, create with and work faster thanks to AI.

Talk to AI: Speech-to-text

Sometimes, it’s easier to say something out loud. With Nextcloud’s speech-to-text feature utilizing Whisper via Replicate, you can formulate text through your voice. Use your spoken words to send a message in a Nextcloud Talk chat, in an email and through many more applications.

Create with AI: Image generation

Your cloud is full of photos, but sometimes the image you need isn’t there. Maybe it is somewhere on the web. Maybe you only have it in your head? With AI image generation, you can type in keywords to create the image you’re looking for. Insert an AI generated image into a Talk chat, Notes and much more.

Nextcloud gives you two options to generate images: the online Dall-E 2 and an on-premises StableDiffusion based generator.

Work with AI: ChatGPT text generation

Recently, all the rage has been centered around the novel ChatGPT, so we’ve decided to integrate its relative right into Nextcloud. ChatGPT, which uses GPT-3 technology by OpenAI, is known for crafting intelligent, professional text and our version is now readily available to use in Nextcloud Talk, Office, Mail and more.

Use the Smart Picker to generate fresh text by giving the tool instructions on what you want to know. For instance, in Nextcloud Talk, ask a question that will help you construct a message to the team you are managing.

The GPT-3 text generation delivers 1 result by default, however the advanced settings allows for as many results as you want and you can even choose the model of data to use for optimal results.

Smarter collaboration with the Smart Picker

Now that we’ve introduced the AI features and how they work, let’s talk more about the Smart Picker. The Smart Picker was created to enhance your workflow and to better collaborate. It is conveniently integrated across all your Nextcloud applications resulting in seamless collaboration.

In addition to the AI speech-to-text, image generation and ChatGPT text generation, you can use the Smart Picker across all applications to:

• Share tasks from a Deck board, card or comment
• Share Nextcloud Tables
• Share a map location (by OpenStreetMap)

• Share a knowledge database items from Collectives pages
• Share videos from PeerTube
• Create Text templates or pre-defined text snippets

• Share GIFs (by Giphy)
• Share Mastadon people, toots and hashtags
• Share Movies, series and people (by The Movie Database)

• Share Files
• Share any link
• Share GitHub issues, pull requests and comments
• Share GitLab repositories, issues and mergers
• Translate with Nextcloud Translate (via DeepL or a local, on-prem translation AI)

The Smart Picker was designed in a way to be easily expandable, so we look forward to many more apps on the store that can help you insert smart information into your documents, mail and more!

Note: In order to activate, you must upgrade to Hub 4 (Version 26) and install the integration apps.

Ethical AI Rating

We thought long and hard about the ethical issues with AI. As you might remember, our previous releases did all AI related work on the server. We did our very best to find ways to classify images, recognize faces and recommend you files without leaking any data to a third party server.

But AI is moving fast, and we do want to give you the option to take advantage of innovations from third party companies like Deepl, OpenAI and others.

We can’t fix all problems in the world, but we can give you a choice, and provide transparency. So, to address the obvious privacy and control challenges that come with artificial intelligence, the AI-powered features are transparently classified with Nextcloud’s Ethical AI Rating. The Ethical AI Rating is based on the availability of code, model and training data so you can make informed choices. We share all about the conditions, classifications and methodology of the Ethical AI Rating in our blog.

Tables App: Alternative to Microsoft SharePoint

Nextcloud Tables is an on-premises, open source SharePoint alternative that lets customers track data that is relevant to their organization, such as expenses, projects or sales leads.

It enables customers to build, manage and work with data structures, putting together easy ‘apps’ and connecting them to various other components in Nextcloud for automation. The flexibility of Tables allows users to tailor the table to their specific needs.

Notes becomes core

Our community Notes app makes a big step forward today: it becomes Nextcloud Notes, and will be a part of Nextcloud core itself going forward. With this change come many improvements, plus the good news that the mobile apps, both for Android and iOS, are now free!

We use notes for a large variety of things – from shopping lists and planning a vacation to jotting down thoughts during a meeting. Much note taking happens on our phones, which often means the notes themselves are hosted by Google, Apple and other big tech companies. That is why we thought it was important to bring Notes into Nextcloud itself!

Besides making the mobile apps free, the Notes app itself now uses Nextcloud Text for the notes themselves. This brings many of the Nextcloud Text features to Notes, including… our Smart Picker! So all the wonderful features you’ve seen above can be accessed in Text – you can insert videos, Tables, documentation, locations and of course ask ChatGPT to help you create some ideas.

Hub 4 Product Improvements

Files, Talk, Groupware and Office are Nextcloud’s key products and each have many exciting improvements and updates!

What’s more, all products are integrated with the new Smart Picker with AI collaboration that will transform the way you work.

Nextcloud Files

Advanced Versioning

In Nextcloud Files, we kept older versions so you never lose the original text or one in between. With Hub 4, we’re taking it to the next level giving users more control over the smart versioning mechanism in Nextcloud. It is now possible to name a version, so you can easily go back to the original copy or one created by a colleague at a certain date and time.

Nextcloud will keep versions using a time based algorithm. This keeps less precise versions over time, for example, keeping 1 version per minute, 1 per hour, 1 per day and so on. The system also acts on available file storage, cleaning up older versions when storage gets low. But named versions are always kept!

AI component: Recommended files are shown at the top of your files list and you can share them based on old sharing behaviors.

Desktop client & mobile apps

The Files desktop client has a major release on the way, however a preview version is out now of virtual files on MacOS. As for the upcoming version, a default browser selection is introduced, as well as the ability to create accounts from the command line. That is of course very useful in large organizations.

As for the Android files app, document scanning with multi-page support to PDF and PNG is now available.

The iOS Files app delivers improvements to document scanning, image editing before uploading, and office document editing improvements.

E2EE improvements

End-to-end encryption is designed to keep a sub-set of super confidential data safe, even if a server breach occurs. Imagine one of the hundreds of universities that use Nextcloud. The collaboration between students should be overseen by teachers and system administrators. But the HR department, dealing with very sensitive employee information, should be able to work on documents without even system administrators being able to view them. This is what End-to-End encryption makes possible. We made two improvements in this release.

First, we introduce sharing. Before, after picking a folder for end-to-end encryption, users could work in this folder and access it from all their clients, mobile and desktop, but not share it. It is now possible for the HR team to share their folders with confidential dossiers with each other!

You may already use File Drop – the Nextcloud feature that allows your external personnel, clients and partners to easily upload files to a secure cloud folder through a hyperlink.

With the new Nextcloud Hub 4 release, File Drop now includes the option to upload files to End-to-End Encrypted folders for increased security in your organization.

Receive confidential files in a secure, trustworthy way without worrying about breaches. It’s simple, secure and a no fuss file exchange.

Going back to the HR department – the team can now send job applicants a link where they can securely upload their resume’s directly in an end-to-end encrypted folder, shared in the HR team.

Nextcloud Talk

This release of Talk introduces a series of awesome features. But before we show those to you, we have to tell you we also deliver a much requested feature: a desktop client for Talk! It is not finished yet, but we would love to get your feedback.

You can download the preview here.

Jump start conversation in breakout rooms

Breakout rooms are excellent for diversifying large meetings and virtual learning environments.

In this release, Nextcloud provides full functionality to set up a breakout room, manage it, send messages and much more.

Record and track every call

For everyday work calls, there’s now a recording option with a time watcher. Easily keep track of time in a call with the time watcher and never be out of the loop with session recording. After the call, simply send the recording in a chat and it will pop-up for all participants to see and utilize.

AI component: Use the Smart Picker in Nextcloud Talk for Nextcloud Dictate (speech-to-text), Nextcloud Translate (with DeepL or on-prem), Dall-E (image generation), ChatGPT technology and much more!

Smart Picker view in Talk

Smart Picker view in Talk featuring the AI image generator with Dall-E & StableDiffuse technology

AI speech-to-text

AI image generator with Dall-E & StableDiffuse technology

Image generated in Talk example

Nextcloud Groupware

Shared mailboxes and S/MIME support

We also introduce shared mailboxes so your enterprise or organization can be more efficient and better organize its teams and workflow.

To improve suitability for large enterprise and government organizations, the Mail App in Hub 4 introduces S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) for digitally signing and encrypting messages.

S/MIME is a security protocol that ensures secure email communication so your information is not compromised.

AI component: Use the Smart Picker in Mail for Nextcloud Dictate (speech-to-text), Nextcloud Translate (with DeepL or on-prem), Image Generation (Dall-E), ChatGPT technology and much more!

Smart Picker Mail highlights

• Text templates – excellent for recurring sales or support messages

Email text templates

• GIF picker (by Giphy) – to lighten the mood in an email chain
• Movies, series and persons (by The Movie Database) – Be part of the movie conversation!

Other improvements in Groupware

• Support for attachments when making an appointment in Calendar
• XOAUTH2 support in Mail to improve interoperability with Outlook and Gmail

AI component: The Smart Inbox in Mail is getting improvements, training the local neural network also on mail subjects to be able to better recommend you important emails.

Attachment support when making an appointment in Calendar

Attachment support when making an appointment in Calendar

Nextcloud Office

New improvements with Text and Collectives

Nextcloud Office has improved integration and performance, document compatibility and a reworked UI.

Real-time cursor tracking

While editing a document, you can now see others who are working on the document too in real-time. As they write and move about the document, you’ll see their name highlighted on their cursor. Watch the additions and corrections others make to better help you work on a shared document.

Collectives

In Nextcloud Office, the knowledge base application Collectives improves the creation of new collectives and moving pages between them. It also links collectives to Files, allowing users to find the files that make up a collective and the collective associated to files more easily.

AI component: Use the Smart Picker in Nextcloud Office for Nextcloud Dictate (speech-to-text), Nextcloud Translate (with DeepL or on-prem), Dall-E (image generation), ChatGPT technology and much more!

Improved text & Smart Picker in Deck

The project management app Nextcloud Deck now also uses the Nextcloud Text functionality for editing the text on cards. This makes it easier for users to add rich content and supports the new Smart Picker.

Deck also features live editing of boards by multiple people, exporting boards to CSV files and creating new tags when assigning them.

Performance improvements

In this release, the loading of folder mounts and container handling has been improved by up to 20%. OCS API requests are up to 3x faster and Nextcloud Talk in particular reduced loading times, server load and notification delays with up to 99%.

New Developer Program

As an extension of this release, Nextcloud is introducing a new developer program to super-charge application development. The Nextcloud App Store has already over 300 apps in circulation, however there are countless more apps we’d love to offer and we need your help.

You can work with AI right now

Microsoft just announced its AI tool Copilot for cross-application collaboration, Google its AI in Workspace, but they are only available for a few select customers. Nextcloud’s Smart Picker with AI features is available right now for you to talk to, create with and work with.

And, where Microsoft fired it’s Ethical AI team, we are taking our responsibility serious. We do our best to provide you on-premises solutions where possible, and if that is not possible – we make it clear when a AI solution leaks data to third parties, is not built on an open data set, or not open source.

Let AI assist you in writing a more captivating message, let your words drive your next email or just engage with it to save time on mundane tasks.

This is your Nextcloud. Your opportunity to use AI. Let it work for how you want it to, without compromising your privacy.

A huge thank you to our community!

This is our biggest step forward. A huge thank you to our community for collaborating with us to create the best on-premises collaboration platform in the world! Without you, our user experience would suffer. For all our consumers, the companies, government and public organizations, schools and universities that aspire to progress, thank you for trusting Nextcloud as your collaboration platform. We hope you enjoy all this new release has to offer.

The post Hub 4 pioneers ethical AI integration for a more productive and collaborative future appeared first on Nextcloud.

Now that Hub 4 has been released, it’s time to introduce the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating.

Progressively, there are more and more risks associated with computer intelligence, and as a transparent software company we have the responsibility to intervene and protect our users.

Recently, Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team, the team that taught employees how to make AI tools responsibly. Nextcloud on the other hand, embraces the ethics and challenges that make up today’s AI and aim to take them head on.

Challenges

The field of AI is moving fast, and many of the new capabilities face ethical and even legal challenges.

For example, there are problems with:

• Privacy and security of user data
• Discrimination and biases
• Energy usage

In particular with neural networks based AI technologies, the mere availability of open source code is no longer enough to be able to say you are in control over your data or that the software is safe or ethical. The set of data and the software used in the training, as well as the availability of the final model are all factors that determine the amount of freedom and control a user has.

Ethical AI standards

Until Hub 3, we succeeded in offering features like related resources, recommended files, our priority inbox and even face and object recognition without reliance on proprietary blobs or third party servers.

Yet, while there is a large community developing ethical, safe and privacy-respecting technologies, there are many other relevant technologies users might want to use.

With Hub 4, we want to provide users these cutting-edge technologies – but also be transparent. For some use cases, ChatGPT might be a reasonable solution, while for other data, it is paramount to have a local, on-prem, open solution. To differentiate these, we developed an Ethical AI Rating.

Ethical AI rating rules

Our Ethical AI Rating is designed to give a quick insight into the ethical implications of a particular integration of AI in Nextcloud. We of course still encourage users to look more deeply into the specific solution they use, but hope that this way we simplify the choice for the majority of our users and customers.

If all of these points are met, we give it a Green label. If none are met, it is Red . If 1 condition is met, it is Orange and if 2 conditions are met, Yellow .

We add one additional note to the rating: bias. As it is impractical to prove there is no bias, we merely point out if, at time of our last check, major biases (like discrimination on race or gender for a face recognition technology for example) were discovered in the data set or in the expression of the model.

There are other ethical considerations for AI, of course. There are legal challenges around the used data sets (in particular, copyright) and the energy usage of especially deep neural networks is of great concern. However, unfortunately, those concerns are extremely hard to quantify in an objective manner and while we intend to try to warn users of any open issues, we can not (yet) include them in our rating.

For that reason, we recommend users to investigate for themselves what the consequences of the use of AI are for their individual case using the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating.

The post Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating 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.

This coming June, Nextcloud will host its bi-annual Enterprise Day in Munich for IT professionals to get the most out of their Content Collaboration Platform.

Munich is the epicenter of Bavarian culture, offering a host of monuments, activities and business ventures. A place of tradition and opportunity, join us for a day in one of Germany’s most beloved cities.

We at Nextcloud are excited to offer our customers, partners and prospects an opportunity to meet us in Munich and learn how to benefit from Nextcloud.

Why attend Nextcloud Enteprise Day?

Imagine a whole day dedicated to improving your business or organizations’ Content Collaboration Platform. From learning about new capabilities, to discussing changes in the industry and security, this day helps you improve your IT strategy, opportunities and decision making.

After attending this Enterprise Day, you will grasp:

• Nextcloud’s newest features and functionalities that will improve your instance’s efficiency
• What makes Nextcloud the leading Content Collaboration Platform in most industries, illustrated by customer case studies of real use-case scenarios
• How Nextcloud will grow with AI
• An overview of the market choices you have and the impact these choices have on the security, compliance and continuity of your business
• Nextcloud future roadmap and differentiation to competitors

Save the date!

Nextcloud Enterprise Day will be held on June 13th, 2023 at the NH München Ost Conference Center in Munich, Germany, with the doors opening at 8AM and the event closing at 5:30PM.

Sneak peek at the agenda

Enterpise Day will be from 08:00 AM – 5:30 PM. The rough schedule is as follows (stay tuned for a more detailed schedule with keynote and presentation speakers):

The post Nextcloud Enterprise Day June 2023 in Munich: Registration open! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Located in the bustling city of Tokyo, Japan, Meiji University is a renowned private research university that has been in existence for over 140 years. Founded by three jurists, it is considered to be one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions in Japan. Meiji University has four campuses spread across the greater Tokyo area, and it currently boasts a student population of around 33,000, supported by a staff just short of 3,000.

Move to Nextcloud Hub

Meiji University looked to improve its Education and Research System (ERS), a virtual infrastructure server group, utilized by both faculty members and students. With more than 900 PCs and 40 printers in circulation, the University recognized the need for a more versatile storage system to meet its growing demands.

Requirements:

• Implement a new storage infrastructure for use in education and research
• Enable access through web browsers and smartphone apps
• Facilitate secure and easy file sharing with users on and off campus
• Ensure secure and easy file sharing with non-domain users
• Provide flexible support for BYOD and other access methods
• Reduce operating costs by utilizing open source online storage

After careful evaluation, Meiji University found that Nextcloud Hub was the ideal solution to meet its needs, and the university decided to implement it with the help of the partner Stylez. As a Japan-based Nextcloud partner, Stylez specializes in providing open-source solutions to customers in the Japanese region. With its team of experts possessing strong technical capabilities and a deep understanding of open-source technology, Stylez was well-equipped to support the implementation of Nextcloud Hub at Meiji University.

Convenience unlocked

Since its introduction in early 2021, Nextcloud Hub has brought significant improvements to the file-sharing and collaboration experience of Meiji University’s students and faculty. The platform offers a secure and easy-to-use platform, making it an ideal solution for their needs.

For instance, Nextcloud Hub enabled users at Meiji University to access their personal folders on campus storage remotely via a web browser or smartphone app. This feature proved to be tremendously popular among users, with many downloading the Nextcloud app on their smartphones right away. With this new feature, file sharing became instantly more secure and convenient for users both on and off campus.

With Nextcloud Hub, faculty members at Meiji University can now seamlessly share files with external collaborators and send large files as email attachments. Previously, the university’s Windows file service struggled to support the high demand for file sharing and lacked user-friendliness, functionality and speed. However, with Nextcloud Hub, these issues have been resolved, and faculty members can now enjoy a more efficient and reliable file-sharing experience.

Open source leading Universities

Unlike traditional cloud storage services that are expensive, lead to vendor lock-in and lack flexibilty, Nextcloud offers an appealing alternative. As an open source platform, Nextcloud, Nextcloud eliminates the risks, complications, and limitations of vendor-lock-in allowing users to benefit from a wide range of features and functions. With Nextcloud, the possibilities for customization and flexibility are virtually limitless.

Meiji University quickly realized the advantages of adopting an open-source online storage solution, such as the ability to maintain on-premises operations and access publicly available source code. With this approach, the university has been able to customize and optimize its file-sharing and collaboration system to meet its specific needs.

Shota Suzuki, a systems engineer at the Ikuta Media Support Office and Information Media Department, was particularly impressed with the transparency and flexibility of Nextcloud. With access to the platform’s source code, he was able to gain a deep understanding of the system and work with it more effectively. Additionally, Suzuki was able to use Nextcloud to enhance his skills and knowledge, contributing to ongoing improvements and developments at Meiji University.

For the full story on Meiji University switching to Nextcloud, check out our case study. Nextcloud case studies feature real-life use cases from customers who made the switch to Nextcloud. By exploring these case studies, you can learn about diverse requirements, the implementation process and results achieved by various customers across multiple industries, including education.

The post Meiji University in Japan Streamlines File Sharing and Collaboration with Nextcloud Hub appeared first on Nextcloud.

In this blog, we describe the use case of the non-profit organization Sea-Watch and why a data sovereign collaboration platform is indispensable to their work.

About Sea-Watch NGO

Sea-Watch is a non-profit initiative dedicated to civil sea rescue in the Mediterranean Sea. In the face of an ongoing humanitarian disaster, Sea-Watch provides emergency aid. The NGO demands and and at the same time forces the rescue missions through the responsible European institution. Sea-Watch also stands publicly for legal escape routes as well as for freedom of movement and a Europe based on solidarity.

The work Sea-Watchs’ 130 employees and 500 volunteers involves rescue and humanitarian work. They document human rights and legal cases, work to inform the public on the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean and advocate extensively in political affairs.

Data sovereign with Nextcloud

Working as a humanitarian aid and activist organization, keeping data safe and confidential is vital for the safety of all parties involved. When looking for a cloud solution, obtaining sovereignty over their data and data security was critical.

Their employees work around the world, so remote working and collaborating is part of their everyday work life.

With Nextcloud, employees and volunteers have a central location to store, share and work on documents that is stored on the Sea-Watch server. They also utilize:

• Nextcloud Polls for data discovery
• Nextcloud Forms for surveys
• Keepass (an open source password manager) for teams / departments

Technical implementation

The Ship IT team deployed Nextcloud on a dedicated server using a Nextcloud provided Docker image, with Office on a second server. A custom tool used to sync files with Nextcloud on board the ships caused a flood of session cookies, sometimes over 30 million between two cron job runs. Some re-configuration of the session management in Nextcloud could fix this.

Since then, the team has migrated Nextcloud to a 3-node Proxmox cluster on which identity management, Nextcloud and office as well as other services are operated. The infrastructure is backed up with Proxmos Backup Server to another location.

Looking forward

The team is constantly growing, and Nextcloud has become the common tool which offers so much functionality enormously important to their daily work.

Nextcloud is pleased Sea-Watch can better operate as an entire organization with more secure and efficient features.

If you’d like to learn more about Sea-Watch, their mission and work, please refer to their website.

The post 500+ users at non-profit organization Sea-Watch use Nextcloud for confidentiality of data appeared first on Nextcloud.

In this next podcast episode, our host Marius Quabeck speaks to a member of the Nextcloud Design Team – Nimisha Vijay. Nimisha started out as contributor through Nextcloud Include and is now on her 2nd year as part of the team.

After listening to this podcast, you will understand:

• How the Nextcloud Design Team functions and works with the community
• The journey to Nextcloud Personal – a customized look and background for your entire instance
• What happens in a Design Review Call
• Why UX is so important for inclusion
• The different resources recommended for developers and others
• How to contribute to design and Nextcloud

We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast!

The post How Nextcloud’s Design Team and Community Work Together – Listen to the Nextcloud Podcast! 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.