We welcome this development, as this is a first step towards investigating the anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft with regard to OneDrive bundling and other gatekeeping actions. Rapid developments in AI only serve to strengthen the need for oversight, as the Bundeskartellamt itself also points out.

Since the initial complaint to the European Commissions’ Directorate-General for Competition, Microsoft has continued to limit on the freedom of choice for consumers. Bundling of software with its operating system continues to expand, while on-premises solutions are eliminated, decreasing the control organisations have over their data. Microsofts’ influence on openAI has already resulted in a decrease in openness about AI research, coinciding with Microsoft firing its ethics team, increasing societal risks regarding artificial intelligence. While Nextcloud has responded to these developments, introducing a Microsoft SharePoint migration service to enable organisations to keep data on-premises, and introducing an Ethical AI solution with integration across its products, anti-competitive behavior limits access of customers to these services.

With even a well-known comedian like John Oliver addressing the challenges with big tech, there is growing awareness. But real action still has not been taken and the tech giants continue to push out the competition by all means available to them.

Dozens of European SMEs organisations support these efforts to push back against Big Tech and create a level playing field, supporting innovation and local (European) businesses. A full list of these companies as well as non-profits and industry consortia can be found on https://antitrust.nextcloud.com.

The post Nextcloud complaint precedes investigation into Microsoft market dominance by German antitrust authorities 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.

Le contrôleur européen de la protection des données est une organisation indépendante chargée de surveiller et de garantir que les institutions de l’UE respectent le droit à la vie privée et à la protection des données des citoyens. Il y a un an, dans un rapport sur les systèmes de gestion des informations personnelles, le EDPS avait déjà mentionné Nextcloud comme exemple d’une excellente solution pour gérer les données personnelles, sensibles à la vie privée, de manière responsable.

Aujourd’hui, nous sommes fiers de vous annoncer que le EDPS a lui-même déployé Nextcloud, et plus encore, qu’il travaille avec notre partenaire TAS Cloud Services pour le rendre disponible à toutes les institutions de l’UE ! Cela signifie que l’UE dispose désormais d’une plateforme de collaboration puissante et complète, conforme aux lois européennes sur la protection des données et non seulement approuvée, mais utilisée et proposée par le contrôleur indépendant de la protection des données de l’UE. Citons le contrôleur européen de la protection des données lui-même, M. Wojciech Wiewiórowski :

Les logiciels libres offrent des alternatives respectueuses de la protection des données aux fournisseurs de services en nuage à grande échelle couramment utilisés, qui impliquent souvent le transfert des données personnelles des individus vers des pays non membres de l’UE. Des solutions comme celle-ci peuvent donc minimiser la dépendance à l’égard des fournisseurs monopolistiques et le verrouillage préjudiciable des fournisseurs. En négociant un contrat avec un fournisseur de services en nuage basé dans l’UE, le CEPD respecte ses engagements, tels qu’ils sont énoncés dans sa stratégie 2020-2024, pour aider les institutions européennes à montrer l’exemple en matière de protection des droits numériques et de traitement des données de manière responsable.”

Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS

Comme beaucoup d’entre vous le savent, de nombreuses organisations gouvernementales de l’UE, comme en Suède, en France et en Allemagne, qui sont préoccupées par la confidentialité et la sécurité, recommandent et déploient Nextcloud depuis des années. Il est formidable de voir la plus haute autorité de l’UE en matière de respect de la vie privée mener cet effort maintenant !

Le EDPS a déployé Nextcloud pour « partager des fichiers, envoyer des messages, faire des appels vidéo et permettre la rédaction collaborative,dans un environnement cloud sécurisé« . (souligné dans la citation originale). Pour permettre l’adoption de Nextcloud dans l’UE, le CEPD a travaillé avec nous chez Nextcloud et notre grand partenaire TAS Cloud Services pour améliorer l’intégration de Nextcloud avec EU login, le service d’authentification des utilisateurs de la Commission européenne. Les services cloud du CEPD et de TAS offriront aux autres institutions, organes et agences de l’UE la même solution que celle déployée au CEPD.

Cela signifie que tout institut de l’UE, de la cour de justice au parlement, peut désormais disposer facilement d’une plateforme de communication et de collaboration sécurisée, facile à utiliser et entièrement conforme. Il n’est plus nécessaire de risquer la souveraineté des données en s’appuyant sur des plateformes cloud non européennes !

Nextcloud offre le moyen le plus simple d’obtenir le contrôle et la souveraineté numérique sur les données et la communication pour les organisations qui traitent des contenus sensibles ou critiques pour l’entreprise. En tant que plateforme de collaboration sur site et à code source ouvert, elle offre une transparence et un contrôle qu’aucune plateforme SaaS non européenne ne peut offrir. Citation du communiqué de presse du EDPS :

En se procurant le logiciel libre auprès d’une seule entité dans l’UE, on évite le recours à des sous-traitants secondaires. Ce faisant, le EDPS évite les transferts de données vers des pays non membres de l’UE et permet un contrôle plus efficace du traitement des données personnelles.

Les parties intéressées peuvent contacter Nextcloud ou notre partenaire TAS Cloud Services pour déployer une preuve de concept de la plateforme de collaboration que le EDPS a déployée.

The post Le contrôleur de la protection des données de l’UE établit la norme en matière de protection des données avec Nextcloud 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.

Based on feedback from users and customers, we focused our efforts on user interface, security and document compatibility. This new release delivers a familiar user interface, an updated Secure View feature and an innovative solution to document compatibility. In addition, we’ve added a series of updates to Collectives to give users and customers an integrated, easy to use alternative to cloud providers of wiki software. Let’s take a look at these improvements more in detail.

Secure View

When working with sensitive information there is sometimes a need to show somebody the contents of a document without them being able to download and share it further. With Secure View, you can share confidential documents with a public link in a access-online-only, no-download capacity, while it still allows recipients to collaboratively edit copy-protected documents (when edit rights are given). Due to its architecture where documents are rendered server-side, the document never leaves the Nextcloud server and to prevent data leaking through screenshots, Nextcloud Office can apply watermarks on documents when Secure View is used.

The use of public links means the current Secure View is designed for use with external collaboration partners. But in larger organisations there are cases where, internally, the need also arises to limit the distribution of documents. Departments might work on a need-to-know basis or have very sensitive documents that should not leak to the outside. To cover this use case, Secure View has been expanded to internal use, allowing users to limit the downloading of documents for other users, be it guests or normal accounts.

Document compatibility – solved.

Nextcloud Hub is a remote office where you can get work done. You can manage tasks and appointments, take notes, write documentation, chat, call & mail and of course edit office documents. These documents are stored in Files – a core component of Nextcloud Hub. While Nextcloud Office can handle an impressive array of file types and beats other online editors in the capabilities it supports , not all documents work perfectly. This can be because it requires local data sources, or uses an obscure, badly documented or proprietary file format. Or perhaps it is a Photoshop file or another specialised document Nextcloud simply has no editor for.

This release of Nextcloud Office introduces an innovative solution for this problem: Edit Locally. To use this, the user simply clicks the Edit Locally button while working on a document. Nextcloud Office then closes the editor for the user and all other users currently editing it. It then saves the file, locks it in Files , syncs it to the desktop of the user and opens it with the local editor. Once the file has been edited and saved and the editor is closed, the file is synced back and unlocked on the server so everybody can go back to editing.

The result is that, for those documents not 100% supported in Nextcloud Office, a local desktop editor is seamlessly integrated in the workflow of the user.

The feature is not limited to Nextcloud Office documents. Nextcloud Files offers access to Edit Locally from the file menu, enabling any document to be edited in a local editor. This is ideal for complex documents like Photoshop files, video editor materials and more. Note that the Edit Locally feature requires the Nextcloud Desktop Client. Today, 3.6.1 was released which fully supports this new feature.

Knowledge Management: Collectives

Collectives, a collaborative knowledge management database or « wiki, » is designed to allow organizations to store, search and share their documentation, processes and other internal knowledge.

It offers fine-grained access control and easy WYSIWYG, fully collaborative document editing, plus powerful external sharing and collaboration capabilities. It is built on Nextcloud Text, the versatile markdown-based note taking application in Nextcloud.

The release introduces several highly requested improvements today, like mentioning users, a table of contents and more. We created a nice screen cast which walks through the new features!

Here is an overview of the improvements:

• User mentions
• Table of contents
• Ability to link to headers between documents
• Improved markdown compatibility and frontmatter support
• Improved page management with drag and drop & custom sort orders
• Improved print and export options
• Support for inserting files in documents
• Support for widgets for links, providing rich previews
• Fulltext search using the Universal Search function in Nextcloud

I want the update!

The Nextcloud Office and Collectives releases are available here including the new features, Users can upgrade right away.

NOTE: the file automatic file locking will come with Desktop Client 3.7. Until then, manual locking is available in the client.

Let us know what you think!

The post Nextcloud Office release solves document compatibility, overhauls knowledge management appeared first on Nextcloud.

We decided to partner up so users who employ Zimbra can benefit from the fusion of the these productivity tools. We have a shared vision on data privacy, so you can rest assured your data stays private.

If you’ve never used Zimbra before, it’s basically a collaboration platform best known for their open source email suite.

New integration features

The Nextcloud and Zimbra integration features the following new capabilities:

• Display Zimbra emails and events on the Nextcloud Dashboard

Now you can have a quick overview of any unread emails and important upcoming events right on your Nextcloud dashboard widget to start your work day off right.

• Search your Zimbra emails within Nextclouds unified search

Can’t find the email you’re looking for but know a keyword? Take advantage of the search provider for emails.

• See and search for Zimbra contacts within Nextclouds contact search

Zimbra and Nextcloud contacts are now synced, so you can search for a contact quickly and easily.

• Create a Nextcloud Talk conversation directly from within a Zimbra Calendar invite

Collaborate even easier

Once you install Zimbra, you can benefit from the best of both collaboration solutions. To further highlight the opportunities of this integration, explore the possibilities below:

• Ensure full governance of all conversations using message audits, flexible retention policies, powerful engagement analytics and dashboards, and more
• Leverage more advanced user governance features, access levels, and role-based permissions
• Easily map even the most complex organizational structure into groups, teams, and discussions

Install today!

You can install the Zimbra integration immediately which is available now at the Nextcloud App Store.

We hope this integration increases productivity, syncs your workflow, and gives you the best of both worlds.

The post Zimbra and Nextcloud announce new integration features! appeared first on Nextcloud.

As most of our readers are likely aware, there has been a wave of recent decisions and Data Protection Office announcements from government agencies all over Europe about the legal challenges of hosting confidential data on especially US cloud services. Most recently the Procurement Chamber of the German state Baden-Württemberg decided US cloud services are not GDPR compliant, but they have been preceded by Dutch, Swedish and many other governments and data protection offices coming to that same conclusion.

This creates a significant need in federal and local government offices working with personal data from citizens for an independent, on-premises, trustworthy collaboration platform. An office solution that is GDPR compliant, open source, standards-compliant, easy to use, performant and decentralized is key for this.

Nextcloud Office Advisory Board

To achieve this, several European Government agencies joined with Nextcloud to deliver this solution and today we announce the formation of an Advisory board with members of the Swedish, German, Swiss and other European federal and local governments. The board aims to further the development of Nextcloud Office, already widely deployed in the Government sector, opening direct communication between the development team and users. The board is looking for new members to participate in the furtherance of European Digital Sovereignty.

Hundreds of municipal, state, federal and EU government organizations in Europe use Nextcloud to collaborate in a secure and compliant manner and deployments are accelerating. Nextcloud Office was launched in December 2021 in collaboration with the online office experts from Collabora. It introduced advanced compatibility with proprietary document formats and alongside the establishment of the Advisory Board, the Nextcloud Office team releases an update with a familiar tabbed menu interface.

Usability survey & document compatibility

To get wider feedback on how Office is used by people, the Nextcloud Usability team is launching a usability survey to investigate usage patterns in the public sector and establish key priorities for development. Users are encouraged to participate in the survey here.

Microsoft Office compatibility with documents is a key concern for our users. We work to made sure that Nextcloud Office has better compatibility with MS Office document formats than the various Microsoft products themselves do between platforms and over the years. Customers will have fewer cases where Nextcloud Office can not display elements of documents than they would encounter on MS 365, especially with legacy documents and file formats.

Nextcloud encourages users to participate in the usability study while we continue to look for public sector users of Nextcloud to participate in our Advisory Board.

The post European Governments work with Nextcloud to build Digitally Sovereign Office appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud Hub II is the world’s most deployed collaboration platform, used by tens of millions of private users, governments, and fortune 500 companies alike to regain data sovereignty and privacy. With Nextcloud, users can share, discuss, and collaborate on documents, track and coordinate work, or organize video calls.

As one of the Open Source community’s most active projects, Nextcloud Hub II v24 integrates improvements from several hundreds of contributors through over 4,000 commits in 1,300 code merges since our 23 release last December 2021.

We’d like to thank all those contributors and everybody else who’s helped make Nextcloud better, be it through code and app development, translations, or participating in our community forums.

Nextcloud Highlights

Since the Swedish Government marked Nextcloud as the key solution for digital collaboration, the Nextcloud user and customer base continues to grow quickly. We recently shared customer success stories with the City of Geneva, the local bank in Munich, 15K teachers in Luxembourg, over 35K middle school students and teachers in France and 750K students and researchers in Sweden.

Not only the Swedish government recognized our platform as leading, so did Capterra, together with the GetApp and Software Advice platforms by Gartner.

We are grateful to all our users and customers for their incredible support!

Digital Sovereignty and Decentralization

User migration

Our goal is to give you, as an individual or business, Digital Sovereignty, that is, to put YOU in control of your data. It is why we provide a special privacy screen and extensive personal privacy settings, why we don’t collect any user data, and of course why you can decide to host your Nextcloud wherever you want. With this release, we are introducing the next step: User migration.

Export and import

User migration allows you to export your data from Nextcloud into a single archive and import it into another Nextcloud instance! This includes user and profile settings and data from the Groupware and Files apps, like calendars, email settings, comments, favorites, and more. An API allows any app to add support for migration, enabling users to take all their data with them.

You are in control!

Where the big tech players like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook aim to lock you into their platforms, we want to give YOU control. Thanks to user migration, you can decide where to host your data – and change your mind! You can upgrade from your Raspberry Pi to a hosted solution, or bring your data back home again.

For businesses, this provides an important compliance benefit as more and more privacy regulations require that users are able to easily export their data from hosted services. For large enterprises, the migration feature enables us to provide a series of new, powerful features, information on which will be made available over the following months.

Nextcloud Files

Nextcloud Files has been polished and brings performance and scalability improvements in the back-end. More visible are:

• Enterprise search API. The new API allows content on Nextcloud to be indexed by a third-party search tool.
• Improved sharing permissions, allowing users to specify edit, delete, and upload permissions in shared folders.
• Share-by-mail with a password can be configured to not rely on a predefined password. Instead Nextcloud will use a temporary token to verify ownership of the email address associated with the share when the recipient visits the link. See more details about the feature in this github issue.

Faster is better

Many of these lower both the load on servers and increase the responsiveness for users, like the smarter handling of file system access that can reduce the database queries for a folder view by 75%. Another improvement is to allow admins to configure when maintenance background jobs are run, so they run at quiet times instead of during peak activity hours. And avatars are no longer generated in many different sizes but in only two, making caching easier and more efficient.

Nextcloud Groupware

In Nextcloud Groupware, much work was done on the user interface and regarding performance improvements.

The calendar app now shows an ‘accept/deny’ for invitations in the calendar item view so you can change your status right there in the web interface. The Mail app introduces two important features:

• Undo sending
• Scheduled sending

The Mail team is asking for user feedback for the Mail app, to help set priorities! If you want to participate, please use this form. The survey is done with Nextcloud Forms so no data is stored besides your input in the form.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud Talk makes a big step forward, introducing a series of reliability and performance improvements as well as some nice, interactive features:

Reactions: now you can react to any message, with any emoji! See others’ reactions to messages.

A media tab: this enables you to quickly and easily search for and see all the media shared within your chat, perfect for when you know someone sent you that one image, but you’d have to scroll back ages to find it!

Much improved desktop integration: direct message reply in a notification and a screen to easily pick up a call

• Ability to select audio output on mobile apps.
• Ability to share system audio (like playing a video) during screen share. This feature is currently only supported by Chrome with ChromeTab or system sound, but we look forward to see other browsers support this feature!

Other improvements were made, like lowering the server load generated by calls with many participants, user interface polishing and more.

Community

We’re very grateful to all the contributors and private users who have helped make Nextcloud the most popular collaboration platform globally!

Before closing, we’d like to give you an opportunity to get involved and contribute to Nextcloud, too.

• We’ve put together a survey to learn more about our users. Please, take a few minutes to fill it in!
• You can get involved with making Nextcloud better or writing apps for our platform. Your work makes a difference!
• Join our community! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Mastodon, and Linked-In, participate in the forums and read our newsletter!
• Nextcloud GmbH is hiring! We have over a dozen open job positions in marketing, sales, and engineering. Consider applying if your skills match one of our needs and join us in making the digital world a safer place!

Nextcloud has become a game-changer for the industry, offering a third way between staying away from the cloud or losing control over your data!

We hope you enjoy our latest release.

The post Nextcloud Hub 24 is here appeared first on Nextcloud.

A database is a critical component for a Nextcloud setup, key for performance, scalability and reliability. MariaDB offers customers the certainty that their database will not be a bottleneck for the productivity of their employees.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH

Nextcloud is deployed at a large scale at some of its customers, servicing millions of users in a single cluster. This puts significant strain on the database, requiring not only scalability and performance but also high availability and robust failover.

MariaDB Enterprise is the complete open source database solution. It supports transactional, analytical and combination workloads as well as relational, JSON and hybrid data models. MariaDB Enterprise, which includes MariaDB MaxScale, can deploy standalone databases and data warehouses to fully distributed SQL, which executes millions of transactions per second and performs interactive, ad hoc analytics on billions of rows.

We’re excited to be partnering with Nextcloud to meet the ongoing needs from customers! Through our partnership, we’re making data readily available and even easier to access for applications and users with full security. With MariaDB Enterprise, Nextcloud customers are able to focus on growing their business without having to worry about the administrative overhead of infrastructure downtime, planned or unplanned.

— Jim Sears, VP Global Alliances, MariaDB

Nextcloud works closely with MariaDB to offer customers access to the best possible expertise. Customers can reach out to representatives from either company for more information.

About MariaDB

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints, and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical, or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers unmatched operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB

Read the full press release here.

The post Nextcloud and MariaDB collaborate to boost scalability and high availability for customers appeared first on Nextcloud.