Hi all!!!

Nextcloud is 1 year old and has become the most active open source private cloud project. We’d like to thank everybody who helped make this possible! I wrote a blog going over some of the highlights of our project over the last year, read it here.

Let me know your experiences with Nextcloud and thanks for being awesome, all of you!

Many of you probably have seen that we released the Nextcloud Box together with Canonical and WDLabs. Yes, this is a continuation of the earlier PiDrive collaboration when we still were at our previous, you know, oldCloud

There will be a webinar about Snappy and the Box early next month, if you're interested, and you can of course purchase the Box from our website.

I'd love to hear feedback from you lot!!!

To avoid some questions, let me answer some obvious ones

• what about other boards?
  • We're working on getting the Pi3 supported, will be before the end of the year. More will follow but it isn't yet clear which, much depends on what Canonical does with Ubuntu Core. I personally have the oDroid C2 high on my wish list
• so Nextcloud sells hardware now?
  • god, no, we make software and we'd like to stick to what we do best. Hardware, hosting - we're super happy if partners do it (see our providers page for hosting!) as it helps people keep their data safe and that is our mission after all. But it isn't our forté. So this device is more of a reference device - we hope others will copy it
• what about the firewall/NAT...
  • yeah. Unsolved. This device works easily, out of the box, locally. But NAT/firewall will still limit its usefulness. We are working on that, though, and help is welcome. We will release a solution once it is finished!
• What about redundancy/backup/more storage?
  • the Box is designed to accommodate a 2nd drive, you could use to expand storage or use as backup. We would also like to have a backup app to secure data for home users somewhere else, well encrypted of course. Help welcome!
    Ask any other questions you have!!!

Oh and yes, we also published version 1.3 of our Android client with a whole bunch of often requested features and - more is coming. We're smokin' hot in this area and that is all community power! Big kudos to our Android contributors.

Hi all!

I have just published our latest development report, which even has a video. Are you interested in this and should I publish future development reports here?

Let me know what you think!

Hi all,

For those who hadn't seen it: we now have Outlook integration for Calendar and Contacts! Cool, right

Hi,

I'd like to hear some feedback. Many of you have been critical, in a constructive way, so this seems a good place to ask for honest, hard feedback!

It isn't a company thing, just me, privately, asking: did we handle the security scan thing right?

In very short:

• we discovered late last year there are tens of thousands of insecure oC and Nc servers on the web
• we discussed what to do:
  • can't contact them directly. Ppl would yell at us for doing a marketing scam, besides, we don't have their contact data.
  • can't just blog or write about it. Black hats would notice and attack while the users themselves clearly don't notice our blogs as they hadn't updated in some cases since 2012.
  • can't do nothing. Some day, somebody will find out and hack 200K servers in an automated fashion, putting the data online or using ransomware to collect big $$$.
  • we concluded we should contact the Computer Emergency Response Teams as it is their job to handle this.
• They reached out to providers who, in turn, contacted the server owners of the servers we had found (about 80K)
• we kept it all secret for 3 weeks to give ppl time to update, then did a media offensive to reach the 120K we couldn't reach directly.
• An estimated 45K updated since we started, right now 97% of Nextcloud servers is secure (and only 29% of oC servers, sadly many of them still didn't respond)

Now most ppl have been positive. But some providers didn't act very professionally:

• some simply forwarded the email, which contained info about all the insecure servers on their network (sigh)
• some called their users, scaring the s***** out of them
• some even threatened to shut down the servers
• others simply DID shut down the network connections (just a few, thankfully)
• and a few did absolutely nothing (not great either)

We had some people complain, saying that we should:

• warn users before we contact them
• not report them 'to the authorities' but contact directly (see above why we didn't)
• we just never should have done this in the first place, it harms users' privacy

Now I've given the arguments laid out above (plus results) to the folks who complained, but in quite a few cases, they continued to disagree. Now like anyone, my tendency is to assume them simply wrong but I also know I'm not perfect so I'm asking here.

Am I missing something? Or are some people just never happy?

Getting your #ownCloud server up and running is now easier than ever: grab our VM with the built in ownCloud Proxy app! If you didn't know about ownCloud Proxy yet (and I can forgive you for that, it is very new) you can learn more at owncloud.org/connect

We've also released 8.1.3, 8.0.8 and 7.0.10 updates. Get the news and updates here.

Hi all!

Just wanted to give a quick news update over the last month - there's been a lot of big news. If you want to have these updates by mail, consider subscribing to our newsletter

The biggest thing is probably that there is now a free version of our Secure Sharing Outlook Add-in for home and small business users.

Second, we're getting close to the Nextcloud Conference and if you haven't booked yet - DO SO! I blogged about it, we announced the Friday program for businesses and the Saturday Keynote speaker, co-founder of Mozilla & privacy/cloud guy Tristan Nitot.

There were some app updates: Group folders app and Circles but also iOS and lots of other apps; and we blogged about our relase channels.

Oh and the capital of Albania and the TU Berlin moved to Nextcloud, with the TU having some nice performance statistics there - almost 50% lower database load by migrating to Nextcloud!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more soon. See you at the conference?

Nextcloud is out! Today we announce the news many of you have been waiting for: the future of private file sync and share! See our blog post.

In short, the core ownCloud contributors are forking into Nextcloud, kickstarting a new company. We'll develop a drop-in replacement with added security and stability fixes for home users, and will throw in Spreed.ME integration. Spreed.ME is secure, private video conferencing software, open source of course. We're becoming a single company, pushing a single, awesome product

For enterprise users - we'll also offer a drop-in replacement for the Enterprise Edition and offer a subscription. Whatever happens, we'll take care of users, both home and enterprise. Info on this page.

I know, big move. No need to make hasty decisions, we want to make this as smooth as possible but as with LibreOffice or MariaDB there will be a transition period. You can stay with ownCloud for now until we've released our replacement and just see what happens. We're not out to destroy ownCloud, after all - we ARE ownCloud. We're essentially doing a reboot, and many employees are either on board, talking to us or invited to join.

The why, how, what - there's more info on my private blog too.

For those who hadn't seen it yet - we've released an update to our two Nextcloud releases with the usual minor improvements and security fixes, but also a long-awaited improvement to our updater.

improved updater

The Nextcloud update process has two major steps: first, replace the files on the Nextcloud instance; and second, run the upgrade process for the apps. The first part has been having some reliability issues and was rewritten. Going forward, we're very confident that the new installer will be able to safely and securely update Nextcloud installations. For this one, users will have to update manually following the documentation

To learn more about the release, check out my announcement blog!

We also have a changelog up.

Good news: Nextcloud 12 is out! With it come all the improvements we discussed for the beta, most in the area of better collaboration and communication. Here's a video with a overview of some of the new features. Read our blog to learn more:

Youtube Video

With it we announce something HUGE: a new architecture for scaling to hundreds of millions of users. It is called Global Scale and also brings benefits for smaller instances and even home users! You can learn all about it in our blog, the Global Scale webpage or the video below.

Youtube Video

I'd like to thank everybody who was part of making this happen, from the most active code contributor to the most casual tester! Without you, we would never have been able to deliver such a great product. #powerofcommunity

It's been a while since I posted, but the last week has been a bit crazy in the Nextcloud world so I thought it'd be nice to share an overview:

• There is a new iOS client with Files integration, just in time for WWDC
• Nextcloud is 2 years old, happy birthday
• The Nextcloud Conference 2018 call for papers is open
• Nextcloud Talk introduces chat on the mobile platforms
• Nextcloud 13.0.3 is out with GDPR tools

And yes, since I last posted we signed the German Federal Government as customer and many cities in europe including the capital of Switzerland, we released Nextcloud Talk 3.2, collaborated with the Turris modular router project to create a Nextcloud Box successor, released a GDPR compliance kit and crazy much more.

Thank you all for being a part of this! We would not have made it through two such great years without the support of our amazing community.

I'd love to meet you all at our upcoming conference! Consider joining!

Berlin is great, I can tell you that - as a Berliner

Hi all!

Today we kick off the AMA and it'd be cool to give you a chance to start asking questions already...

So, I thought I'd give you a few interesting tidbits of history & who we are to read through and then - ask below. We (Frank, Lukas and myself) will introduce ourselves at T=0 and I'll make sure we cover those questions during the AMA.

Now, HISTORY.

before the world was born

kidding, of course. So in 2010, Frank announced ownCloud: a project to built an alternative for Dropbox, Google Drive and similar. A bunch of folks joined, it was fun and some releases were made (ownCloud 1.0, 1.1, 2.0). Frank the met 2 guys, former SUSE exec's, who brought in investors and the three started a company. Many of the community members were hired and for about 5 years, lots of open source software was written.

Also some closed source, as ownCloud followed an Open Core model: you had to sign your copyright away to be able to contribute. Only customers got access to a subset of features.

Nothing horribly wrong in principle, but a model that is hard to keep in balance. And May 2016 Frank left because that balance wasn't going in the right direction. With him almost all engineers left and started a new company, with the founder of Red Hat Germany as co-founder and investor. This time no open core, but fully open source.

Today, Nextcloud is the biggest, most active open source file sync and share project and the business is profitable and growing fast.

Boxes & stuff

So we've been doing a bunch of cool things. Yes, that includes Nextcloud 9, 10 and 11. Also very exciting is our collaboration with Canonical and Western Digital, resulting in the Nextcloud Box, a Raspberry Pi based private cloud server.

And what else?

We're building Spreed, audio/video chat integrated in Nextcloud. We worked with Collabora to create a docker image so now all Nextcloud users (as well as users of Kolab, Seafile and even ownCloud) have access to a private online office. There are other, interesting apps in development like Passman, a password manager (with KeePass import), Nextant, a full text search tool (we hired its author earlier this month - if you built such a cool app, WE WANT YOU!), and there's Mail, Calendar, News, Contacts and two-factor authentication and more, all developed by contributors from our community, or employees, or both together.

Oh and I should mention...

• We organize the Nextcloud Conference, August 22-29 in Berlin
• We are present at loads of conferences like SCALE, MWC and more and organize our own meetups, see our events page
• If you read through all these boring details you deserve something. So, ask a question during the AMA involving bananas tomorrow and you have a chance to earn a Nextcloud Box.

Hi all,

You might remember we were working with Western Digital on an #ownCloud #RaspberryPi device! Well, it took a bit longer than planned but our first testing images are ready. By the end of next week our first batch of 30 test devices will be available for sale, followed by another batch of 50 about a month later while we gear up for a small production run of 500.

Future versions (including the 500 production run) will probably also be available for other Pi like devices including Beagle Board and Banana Pi. We choose Raspberry Pi as base device as it's so ubiquitous and we'll be building on Snappy Ubuntu Core 16.04 (pre-beta!) as that provides a great base for a device like ours, with its transactional upgrades, embedded focus and wide user base and support in the industry.

Want to provide a safe home for your own data? This is the time to get involved and help us test and improve this!

I just published a blog here and you can grab the images directly here. There are three images there: one for the SD card (the bootable), one for the hard drive (the larger one) and a two-in-one for testers without hard drive (the largest image). Scripts are here, that's also where contributions can go

As many of you have experience with performance tuning, I'm hoping we can get some help with making the Pi faster for serving ownCloud!

Enjoy and let us know what you think of it.

Last week I wrote about our new head of sales and others we've hired the last months and I just updated our jobs page with a new position - right now we're looking to fill three positions:

• Sales engineer
• Account manager
• Embedded Linux developer

Now you might know this Nextcloud thing by now, we're the new kid on the block with a large history - 4 months old yet most of us have been working on this tech for 5 years, since our founder, master & commander Frank started it under the name ownCloud. The goal: provide a self-hosted, privacy-respecting alternative to Dropbox and, later, the cloud services from Google and other companies. We've done this by building a modular, flexible application which lets a wide variety of app authors provide the pieces beyond the core functionality of file access, syncing and sharing. We're by far the most popular open source file sync and share project, in no small part due to our deep pragmatism (hence PHP is our language of choice, though we also have some go code here and there) and strong focus on ease of use and good design.

We're a very modern, fun and driven company. We want to change the world and meetings and rules and processes get in the way of that so we work decentralized (as in, most of us work from home) and results are what counts, the rest - pfah, details.

Now we tend to hire as much as possible from our community, as that is a triple win: they get a job they like, we get motivated people we don't have to micromanage AND we don't have to have complicated job interviews or a vetting process: we just look at github and ask the employees who worked with them how good they are.

If it sounds like something you want, check out nextcloud, check out our repos and our jobs page!

Help us spread the word on this, it matters!

Hi folks,

I've been not-so-active here for a while, mostly due to travel (Hi SCALE, hi Chemnitz) and of course our security scan - I'm not even sure if I posted here so for those who have been living under a rock (ahem): our blog and Der Spiegel article

Remember all those times I told you to update? Right

here some more reasons why you should update - the risks are REAL.

Meet us!

Anyhow, I wanted to invite you to meet us. We're at a bunch of events like CeBIT and more (see our events page) but of course the coolest would be to join us at a hackweek and a new one is coming! From March 25-31, we'll be having open doors in Stuttgart.

Ok, if you can't make it - I should remind you of the Nextcloud Conference in August. We opened a Call for Papers last week and contributors who want to join and need travel support should ping me. Oh, it helps if you submit a talk

A big benefit of Letsencrypt is the automation. The automation on a server box was already mentioned, but it goes further than that: you can create a VM or a liveCD or a docker container etc to distribute your server application and use Letsencrypt. Unlike today, you won't have to use a self-signed certificate or let the receiver of the VM add one by hand, you can generate one with Letsencrypt on the fly! That is a game changer for ISV's who want to simplify deployment for small business customers, really.

We intend to use it in our official ownCloud VM's (for home users and SMB) and it is also super interesting for our collaboration with Western Digital on creating a self hosting device based on a Raspberry Pi 2. And I'm looking forward to getting it on my server - right now, openSUSE isn't supported, I hope they take care of that soon.

I thought I'd create ONE topic for ownCloud development reports rather than opening new ones all the time. Cool?

Here is the first then

Dear ownCloud users!

ownCloud 9.0.1 can be found on our download servers, get it while it is hot.

This release brings over 120 updates to core ownCloud functionality including sharing, CalDAV and CardDAV, external storage, encryption and much more. Find it extensively documented in our changelog.

For more details see our release blog.

As usual: it is strongly recommended to upgrade, for reasons of stability as well as security. We're very proud that we've been able to publish some good news in the latter department (one and two) but you'll only benefit if you stay up to date!

Note that our automatic updater app will offer you this new version some time over the weekend.

For those waiting for the Enterprise Edition, it's coming next week, building on the community version with features allowing admins to keep their files in compliance with various legal regulations.

As usual - many thanks to everybody involved, testing, developing, designing, translating or telling me about silly mistakes on the website

Without your input, ownCloud would not be what it is today! And it is an awesome product, giving millions of users control over what happens to their private data. Keep up the good work and, of course, share the news and let us know what you think.

Greetings,
Jos

Today is a BIG day, something you all should share with us in celebration! We've hit an important milestone: last year, the #ownCloud community grew by an impressive 80%, bringing our contributor base over 1000 individuals who contributed code in 100.000 commits! In ownCloud Core alone, we've hit 10.000 merged pull requests today.

Congratulations to those 1000 individuals and the thousands others who contribute to ownCloud by translating, advocacy, design and helping others on the forums. YOU ARE OWNCLOUD!

We're so proud ... I can't say THANK YOU!!!!!! enough!

read more about this awesomeness and be sure to share!

https://twitter.com/ownClouders/status/732571170428575745
https://www.facebook.com/ownClouders/posts/1715414342059832
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7389017

Hugs,
Jos

Together with Collabora, we bring #LibreOffice Online to the masses. Every Nextcloud user can now enjoy their own Online Office. Get your #docker image now: here.

We also announced that we're invited by the TU Berlin to do a conference there!