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We are excited to officially announce this year’s Nextcloud Conference and Contributor Week!

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As the form is in German, if you need help, read on for some quick tips that help you get through the German form fast!

Let’s make it together to 1st place in 2023!

Over the last six years, readers of the renowned German “Insider Medien” magazine have voted Nextcloud to third, second, and three times first place! Share your love again for your preferred Filesharing & Collaboration Tool and let’s make it together to the first spot in 2023!

The voting form is available in German only, so here’s a quick guide for English speakers. Click the button below and then follow the steps: Note: Even if your browser has automatic translations, the voting is in a box that does not translate itself.

1. Open the form, Click on “Los geht’s” which means “Let’s go”
2. Confirm “ok” or just scroll down
3. Scroll to the “Cloud Content Management” category or “Kategorie” and click the Nextcloud logo to vote (or the one you prefer) and press “ok” Note: It will be selected in red
4. Scroll fully down and click on “Weiter” meaning “Continue” to fill out the following:
5. The next page has several options:
   • Click “Nein” for “No” to decline or “Ja” for “Yes” to subscribe to their newsletter
   • Select which other IT themes interest you (optional)
   • Fill out your information
   • Click “Nein” for “No” to decline or “Ja” for “Yes” to join in on the contest
6. Finally, click “Umfrage abschliessen” or “complete survey” to submit the vote!

Thank you for your time and support!

The post Nextcloud nominated for CloudComputing-Insider Award 2023: Vote now! appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud users know the importance of integrating different systems and tools to create a seamless workflow. Nextcloud Enterprise allows you to integrate with Microsoft environments for file storage, user directory, Outlook, Sharepoint, Windows Desktop, MS Office online server, and Teams. And now, we are excited to announce a new addition to our lineup: the Nextcloud Exchange Connector.

Developed in partnership with Sendent, the Nextcloud Exchange Connector offers bi-directional syncing with Microsoft Exchange. With this new connector, you can seamlessly sync your contacts and agenda items between Nextcloud Enterprise and Exchange, eliminating the need for double agendas or manual copying and pasting.

Sendent is best-known for their Outlook add-in, which turns email attachments into secure and sharable Nextcloud links, avoiding the sending of risky attachments within organizations. After several requests from clients, Sendent investigated the option to build a connector to link Exchange with Nextcloud. The first iteration of this connector will focus on syncing contacts and agenda items, with more syncing capabilities to be added later.

“At Nextcloud, we believe in the power of integrations to drive and increase productivity on collaboration platforms. Nextcloud Enterprise is designed to integrate well with Microsoft environments. We are excited to partner with Sendent for the development of the Nextcloud Exchange Connector, which will bring new integration capabilities to open up Exchange data to Nextcloud Enterprise.” – Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud.

We are thrilled to launch a beta program for the Nextcloud Exchange Connector, and we are inviting users, sysadmins and developers to participate. By joining the beta program, you will have the opportunity to provide feedback and help shape the final version of the connector. Depending on the amount of interest we receive, we may select a specific group of testers to interact with in this beta program.

All signups to the beta program will get early access to the connector. If you simply want to be kept up to date regarding the release of this Nextcloud Exchange Connector, you can also leave us your details so that you will be the first to know.

Don’t miss out on the chance to be one of the first to try out the Nextcloud Exchange Connector.

Sign up for our beta program via the form below.

The post Join our Beta Program for the Nextcloud Exchange Connector 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.

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.