Vielfalt und Weltoffenheit sind zentrale Werte für Nextcloud. Wir sind davon überzeugt, dass eine inklusive Gesellschaft der Grundpfeiler für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit sowie ein friedliches Zusammenleben in Europa ist. Nextcloud beschäftigt Mitarbeitende in 23 Ländern. Hinzu kommen tausende Mitglieder der Nextcloud-Community, die global verteilt gemeinsam an einem Ziel arbeiten. Nur dank dieser offenen und inklusiven Kultur konnte sich Nextcloud zu der weltweit am meisten genutzten Open-Source-Kollaborationsplattform entwickeln.
Europa braucht starke Stimmen für die Demokratie
Am 23. Februar wird in Deutschland ein neuer Bundestag gewählt. In anderen Regionen und Ländern der Welt sehen wir schädliche Tendenzen zu ausgrenzendem und autoritärem Regierungshandeln. Eine demokratische Gesellschaftsordnung ist für uns als Unternehmen und auch für unseren Lebensstandard in Europa jedoch ganz entscheidend. Denn Demokratie ist die Basis für innovative Wirtschaftskraft und die Voraussetzung für ein erfolgreiches Gelingen einer digital gerechten und wettbewerbsfähigen Zukunft in Europa. Deshalb treten wir allen, die sie gefährden, entschieden entgegen. Denjenigen, die für Demokratie, Vielfalt, Inklusion und den damit verbundenen Wohlstand stehen, sichern wir unsere Unterstützung und Solidarität zu.
Wir freuen uns über jede Person, jedes Unternehmen und jede Organisation, die sich für die Demokratie und damit für ein starkes Deutschland und Europa einsetzt – je mehr und je lauter desto besser. Nur wenn wir in Europa geeint für unser freiheitliches Wertesystem kämpfen, können wir unsere Eigenständigkeit erhalten. Wer am 23. Februar das Privileg der freien Wahl hat, sollte es nutzen und für demokratisch gesinnte Parteien stimmen. Nur gemeinsam sind wir stark, können unsere Freiheitsrechte schützen und eine positive Zukunft gestalten.
“We must unlock our innovative potential. This will be key not only to lead in new technologies, but also to integrate AI into our existing industries so that they can stay at the front.”
Mario Draghi
Europe faces significant challenges in staying competitive in a rapidly evolving digital world dominated by the US and China. The Draghi report sheds light on the EU’s dependence on foreign technology, the need for innovation, and actionable strategies for building a resilient digital economy. In this post, we explore the report’s key insights, highlight the pressing issues, and discuss what they mean for the tech industry and Europe’s digital future.
In September 2024, the European Union published a report by Mario Draghi highlighting Europe’s competitiveness and future ability and opportunities to compete.
In a world that faces increasing uncertainties, economic stability and growth means the ability to make its own choices for Europe. The sovereignty that we push for will be lost if we are unable to fix the systemic issues that hold us back and Europe is exposed to the will and arbitrariness of the techno-imperialism of other countries.
These issues have been driving us at Nextcloud for the past decade, and we read the report with the utmost attention, but left wondering how much of this will actually be realized.
The report gives a comprehensive analysis of where EU came from and where it is heading. It outlines the basic principles and in what way they are being threatened in the current climate of geopolitical tensions and decreased velocity of economic growth, as opposed to American and Chinese markets.
It comprises two parts, divided into strategy and analyses with actionable recommendations. Part A offers a meticulous review of where Europe is at, how it developed up to this point, and the events that led to it and the many challenges it faces on economic, societal, digital as well as political level. This gives rise to the following pressing questions:
How can Europe promote growth and foster innovation, while setting the guardrails for a secure and thriving digital economy?
How can Europe’s independence be secured and harmonized, and streamlined yet effective regulation be implemented and enforced across borders?
How can Europe become a global digital player and serious partner for both China and the US?
Those big questions will not be answered in full but they offer an idea of the vast scope of challenges lying ahead. In part B, the strategy is analyzed towards actionable solutions and shows us ways how to get there.
For us at Nextcloud, the report presents many useful insights and challenges the European economy is facing to help us prepare and position in an unstable geopolitical climate and a new US government that has already taken the first steps to put America first. Even though the recommendations are addressed at the EU, one of the most important areas of development is digitization and how Europe can be sovereign and resilient in the face of hyperscalers from China and the US.
As an industry stakeholder, our interest lies in contributing to a diverse digital landscape where fair competition is fostered and supports a thriving digital economy and its fair and accessible development.
The report names the following as the most crucial challenges for Europe that need to be tackled by the current and forthcoming European Commission so as not to fall behind and protect a prosperous Europe:
Create and promote a resilient digital infrastructure
Enhance cybersecurity
Support sovereign AI development to increase Europe’s digital competitiveness
The ICT sector specifically is key to advancing Europe’s strategy to foster sovereignty such as private cloud solutions where enhanced security and encryption is required, as well as acting as a performance driver in other sectors such as pharma, energy, or defense. It is obvious that Nextcloud can play a key role here, as it is the main player that can replace Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, two foreign platforms that are currently mission-critical for many organizations in Europe.
Green transition: Europe has the opportunity to be the leader in climate neutral technologies and circular economies and be the front-runner in helping industries de-carbonize and reach climate protection goals. With the US now planning to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, this is more important than ever. The big US tech firms pay lip-service to green technology, but their investments especially in AI show these words are often hollow.
Innovation and research: In order to enable and boost innovation, Europe must invest in R&D, support innovation hubs and strengthen collaboration between public and private sectors. This point is especially important for us as obstacles of procurement and tenders across borders are often over-complicated, preventing collaboration and fair competition. But the differences among members states in applying and enforcing GDPR make experimenting and pioneering with AI a lot more difficult. The EU has to very carefully balance the regulatory frameworks with tolerant rules that bolster investment in innovation. The way forward is harmonized regulation that remove overlaps between GDPR and AI Act.
Internal market integration: As outlined under 3 above, removing barriers within the EU to allow cross-border trade, make single market more efficient, ensure fair competition is paramount to make Europe resilient and support SME to develop and prosper. The actual competition policy in place needs to be examined under in terms of striking a balance between sufficient protection and the ability for businesses to scale and innovate particularly in comparison to Chinese and American hyperscalers.
Global trade strategy autonomy: Education is at the heart of a prosperous democracy, and is especially important to promote it further so that Europe’s workforce is equipped for a digital and green future.
Overall, the digital transformation process is too slow and too weak in comparison. Currently, there are only four digital platforms that are based in the EU, the lion’s share of the market is dominated by US corporations Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta, Apple and X as well as Tencent, ByteDance, Baidu and Alibaba from China. European citizens do not have a huge choice to opt for a European solution. The problem is not only market dominance and vendor-lock ins, it is also a lack of interoperability and high security risks.
All this diminishes Europe’s chances for growth and weakens our competitive positions. So far, the DMA and DSA were enforced, and set out to be a game-changer in competition: But will it be able to go into effect quickly without stifling innovation? The DMA and DSA, which are both carefully crafted to avoid bureaucratic hurdles for smaller organizations, can play a major role in negating the huge anti-competitive gatekeeping that the big tech firms currently use to suppress competition from European IT companies.
These are the risks at stake that the EC must take into consideration when they want to secure the vast potential of cloud computing services (estimated at EUR 200 billion by 2028). But the European providers’ share has even decreased down to 16% (2021), in no small part due to the aforementioned gate keeping. This can be mitigated by decisive enforcement of the new laws by the European Commission, but unfortunately, the commission has shown little appetite for defending its IT industry. The anti-trust complaint against Microsoft, filed by us and some 40 other small EU IT companies in 2021, has still not seen any real action.
Europe today stands at a decisive point: The digital strategy has brought important new legislation, but the economy is increasingly falling behind and must be made fit to be able to continue to play a key role on a global stage.
The Draghi report sheds light on the most pressing questions and offers actionable recommendations as to how to overcome these challenges and lead Europe into a secure and prosperous future. What is needed is the ability to make fast and agile decisions so as to be able to compete with China and the US, stand strong against unstable geopolitical tensions and become the role model for resilient digital regulation. Overall, the report recommends to strive for a more dynamic, resilient and sustainable economy in Europe that can compete on a global stage while ensuring social fairness and environmental responsibility.
We at Nextcloud have remained true to our vision: empowering collaboration without compromising on privacy. This year has been a testament to that commitment. Together with the passion of our global team and the support of our community we have not just build the best open-source collaboration tools, but expanded our dedication to open source itself.
In this annual wrap-up, we want to take a moment to celebrate this year’s achievements. Join us as we continue to reimagine what’s possible – shaping a world where open source, privacy and connection come together and drive progress for the greater good.
~ Nextcloud team
Charting global growth
Nextcloud is used around the world by private individuals, communities, enterprises, and governments. In 2024, millions of new users gained access through hundreds of new enterprise customers. In the wider community, exact numbers are difficult to come by but there are some 400-500K servers online and this number also continues to grow steadily, with tens of thousands of new deployments across the globe from the US to France, from Australia to Indonesia and South Africa to Hawaii.
These numbers convert in the change Nextcloud brings about, contributing to a more connected, privacy-respecting, transparent, and safer digital world – where we interact with government services, access our education, cast votes in elections, fill forms on websites and call our colleagues and friends through video chat.
Change starts with people
This year, our team has grown significantly, reflecting our success. With 20% increase in size we are now 118 strong united by a shared vision across 23 countries. That includes 7 working students who get a chance to learn the ropes at Nextcloud. While we have expanded into a bigger office space in Berlin, we remain proudly remote-first, reflecting the flexibility and global collaboration that define our culture.
A spirit of fellowship: Nextcloud community
As an open-source project, Nextcloud thrives not just on code but on the people behind it. Thanks to all the developers, translators, maintainers, and other enthusiasts that contribute, Nextcloud has grown into the platform of choice for those who value privacy, security, and transparency. Let us share some facts about Nextcloud in 2024!
38k+ GitHub commits
Made this year by the Nextcloud team and community.
11.3k+ new forum members
+8,4K new topics and +41.7 new posts on the Nextcloud Community forum.
100+ security experts thanked
Our engineers responded to reports in 5 hours on average, with 100% response efficiency.
100+ languages
Thanks to the translator community, Nextcloud is available in 107 languages, 41 exceeding 50% completion.
Click to listen to the podcast episode!
Shaping collaboration of tomorrow with Nextcloud Hub
The efficient Nextcloud Hub 8
Launching Nextcloud Hub 8 under the “Regain control over your time” theme, we made it all about efficiency. With Nextcloud Assistant 2.0 bringing innovative AI features, interactive widgets connecting our apps further, advancing chat and sharing tools and ambitious architecture undertakings, this release gave you more control than ever before.
The connected Nextcloud Hub 9
Our latest release brought a major visual redesign to the platform, resulting in a slicker experience all around. But it’s not all about the looks – with a growing stack of federation features, automation centralizing under Nextcloud Flow, and further efforts to elevate performance and scaling, Nextcloud Hub 9 made headlines this September as an “Explosive release”.
Nextcloud Talk: the open-source answer to Teams
In an unrestful world of today, dependency on centralized, opaque systems under strong foreign influence is a ticking clock. It is time the open-source world had a real answer to Microsoft Teams. Nextcloud Talk is the only open-source conferencing hub that seamlessly integrates chats, video meetings and webinar functionality in one powerful, privacy-respecting platform.
We are wrapping up 2024 with a strong standalone release of Nextcloud Talk, celebrating its reinvention within Nextcloud’s product portfolio. New desktop application, new AI features, new streaming capabilities, simplified and mindful collaboration, and reinforced security (again!) – we invite you to meet the new Nextcloud Talk.
Standing ground against Big Tech
In an attempt to slow down the antitrust case backed by Nextcloud and other members of the Coalition for level playing field, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from the Windows ecosystem. Such “malicious compliance” is one of the common instruments in the Big Tech arsenal used to resist the limiting market regulations. A legislation like EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) could protect fair competition further, once it targets Microsoft’s cloud products that squeeze numerous local providers from the market.
With this struggle still far from over, some results of our common efforts are evident. Earlier this year, Germany has officially recognized Microsoft as a tech giant and made it “subject to extended abuse control”, three years since the formal antitrust complaint.
When the global IT so evidently lacks digital sovereignty and resilience, we naturally consider the fight for a fair trade a part of our mission.
AI with ethical integrity
Like we said in one of the early introductions to our AI tools, some AI is hype and some is substance. And we want to give you the substance. Nextcloud does become a better version of itself with the evolving AI stack, helping you get some tasks done quicker.
The back-end, the UX, the features, and the models you can use to power up Nextcloud Assistant – this year our engineers and contributors have done work to be proud of. From context-aware features with Nextcloud Assistant 2.0 and chat UI and platform-wide integration in Nextcloud Hub 9 to new open-source AI models – you can enjoy a fully AI-powered workspace.
And most importantly, you stay in control of this powerful technology. To build the system that you can rely on and keep your data yours, you can refer to our Ethical AI Rating and decide what AI you want to use in Nextcloud Hub.
Ready for mission-critical, enterprise deployment
Enterprise support for Roundcube
Since Roundcube joined us, Nextcloud began to receive requests from large hosting companies for support. In August Nextcloud introduced the first official offering of enterprise support for Roundcube! It is tailored specifically for mail providers running large instances with thousands to millions of end users. We also offer our services to help businesses, universities and the public sector, but our offering makes the most sense for larger installations.
Process automation at scale with Nextcloud Flow
Shortly before Nextcloud Hub 9, Nextcloud has presented the first automation-enabled open source platform for implementing the Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz, OZG) in Germany and similar use cases in other countries. The Nextcloud Flow toolbox provides administrations with a digitally sovereign tool for offering and automating public services online and for exchanging the underlying processes among themselves.
BITV 2.0 certified Nextcloud
Nextcloud Enterprise has been awarded a German BITV 2.0 certification that is based on WCAG 2.0 benchmark. This means that the enterprise and public sector users can be confident in the accessibility standards of Nextcloud. The platform is designed with all users’ needs in mind, suitable for people with limitations and requirements for non-standard input devices and additional measures like a screen reader. Contact your sales representative if you require the certification.
News talk: In the spotlight
Spanish newspaper El Espanol reported on the Nextcloud Community Conference.
German netzpolitik.org and others reported on the update regarding the complaint against Microsoft.
German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel published a bylined article by Frank Karlitschek on open source as a pioneer of digital sovereignty.
Weekly newspaper Die Zeit published an article on Microsoft’s practices of bundling following an interview with Frank Karlitschek.
Süddeutsche Zeitung Dossier published an article exploring the transition of Schleswig-Holstein state administration from Microsoft, featuring a conversation with Frank Karlitschek and Dirk Schrödter of Schleswig-Holstein.
This September, we hosted our annual community gathering in Berlin once again. With attendance beating all the records, we certainly scaled up – and so did the program! Our guests – about 200 open-source enthusiasts, Nextcloud lovers, and team – were joined by speakers of a great caliber: computer scientist, author and spokeswoman of the Chaos Computer Club Constanze Kurz, and professor Björn Lundell, a researcher and Software Systems Research Group lead at the University of Skövde.
As always, Nextcloud Community Conference is a platform for our community to showcase their projects and discuss modern day wins and challenges of open-source! You can find the recordings of all the lightning talks in a dedicated YouTube playlist.
Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Paris, Munich and Frankfurt
Nextcloud Enterprise Day is gaining a momentum each year. Over two hundred enterprise and public decision makers attended our first event in Frankfurt in 2024. Featuring keynotes by leading voices across industries, product announcements and roadmap sneak peeks, and ample opportunities for networking and optimizing your platform, it provides a premier setting to explore and advance privacy, digital sovereignty, and digitalization. The success prompted us to organize two more events, in Munich and Paris.
This year, we hosted Nextcloud Enterprise Day in three cities:
Nextcloud Enterprise Day Munich
Nextcloud Enterprise Day Frankfurt
Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris
Each year, Nextcloud Enterprise Day events grow in relevance among enterprise audiences, evident in rising attendance and enthusiasm. In 2025, we aim to amplify their impact by exploring new formats and locations.
This year’s content highlights
This year has been busy for our content team. Numbers speak: 154 blog articles, 9 Nextcloud Podcast episodes, 59 videos, 14 community newsletters, an a lot more content across social media and other channels. Here are some of the most popular pieces for you.
With our developer program, you get an opportunity to create apps for hundreds of thousands of Nextcloud servers deployed across the globe. With our App Store, you get free promotion and an opportunity to publish apps for both end users and businesses.
Create new apps or build on top of the Nextcloud platform using 11 available app tutorials. This year, we added 2 new tutorials: a ‘hello world’ app tutorial and a guide to using Github Codespaces as a developer environment.
Other important improvements for developers this year include:
Getting help from Nextcloud translator community with Transifex
New mechanics in AppStore: donations, enterprise support
We designed Nextcloud to fit effortlessly into your existing workflows – by offering a wide range of integrations with popular tools and platforms, and an ability to create unique Nextcloud-ready apps in any programming language. This year, we introduced integrations with popular apps XWiki and Paperless-ngx, added new AI models to power up Nextcloud Assistant, and enabled enterprise support for a range of apps, working together with teams behind them.
New app integrations:
Paperless-ngx
XWiki
Enterprise support for apps:
Mailvelope
Dovecot
Stalwart
New AI models supported:
NeuralBeagle14 7B
Smaug-72b
LLama3
Let’s make it awesome in 2025!
If you made it this far, we hope this hefty read has brought you a personal reason to celebrate alongside us. From millions of new users choosing privacy to an ever-expanding deployments of servers worldwide, Nextcloud continues to connect people and organizations without compromising control over their data. And our story as a community-driven project is told by people. So today we thank you for being a part of it.
When cables are cut, sanctions are put in place or privacy legislation prohibits the use of the service your entire organization depends on, what can you do?
Amidst geo-political changes, organizations face dependencies on large, centralized communication platforms. A major example of this is the SaaS-only communication platform Microsoft Teams. It is the only solution on the market which deeply integrates video calls, team chat and large group call features with real-time document collaboration and file sharing, and has become critical to the functioning of many organizations. Which, in turn, has allowed Microsoft to hike prices by 20 to 40% and not face an exodus of customers – as they and their data are fully locked in.
Organisations, small and large, need a way to ensure the resiliency and digital sovereignty of their operations – an open source, privacy respecting alternative to Teams. And today, we present that solution.
In this short webinar, Jos walks you through how Nextcloud Talk takes on Microsoft Teams!
Welcome to Nextcloud Talk
Today, live from our Enterprise day in Paris, we launch Nextcloud Talk „Paris“. It is the only open-source solution that integrates all key features – from chats and video conferencing to webinars, complete with file sharing and office document editing – into a single platform while avoiding vendor lock-in.
Our platform meets the highest standards of compliance with privacy legislations like GDPR or HIPAA and offers strict data security, ensuring full data control. Thanks to its open architecture, Talk can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems and tailored to individual needs.
Nextcloud Talk is designed to address three key use cases. Let’s go quickly over them!
Efficient team chat
The integrated chat in Nextcloud Talk is designed to help teams stay connected throughout the workday. With multiple chat rooms and the ability to edit files directly within the chat, Talk streamlines hybrid team collaboration and boosts efficiency. End-to-end encryption ensures that calls remain private and secure, while integrated real-time notifications keep everyone in the loop. All data stays under your control, meeting the highest privacy and security standards.
It features deep integration with a wide variety of content. Users can add documents – and edit them right there, inline, without having to open tabs or download the file. Locations, tasks, calendars and notes can all be inserted, viewed and edited without leaving Talk.
Video calls for seamless collaboration
Nextcloud Talk makes virtual meetings easy and accessible across devices. Whether it’s a quick check-in or a larger team meeting, our platform ensures powerful collaboration for hybrid working teams. Features like integrated whiteboards, screen sharing, and joint document editing make real-time collaboration easier than ever. Scheduling and joining calls is effortless, directly from the Nextcloud interface, integrated with the calendar app for easy scheduling of meetings.
Interactive webinars, education and training sessions
Talk enables you to host engaging webinars – bringing audiences like teams, students, or customers together. The platform supports live streaming, Q&A sessions and screensharing and comes with moderation features. Functions like the integrated chat, animated reactions, polls and breakout rooms make the learning experience more interactive and fun. All this, and more, is available wherever you are. Not only in the browser, but also with apps on iOS and Android! When your colleague calls you while you’re out, your phone will ring and you’ll be able to share your screen to show them a quick presentation you’re working on.
You can give participants a phone number to dial in to, and even pull them in by dialing out right from Talk. Need to add hundreds, even thousands of participants? Simply import a spreadsheet. After the call, you export the participant list and see who did and did not show up!
Break up big groups in breakout rooms, enabling everyone to be productive in a smaller team before coming back together to the big group. In your breakout room you can do a call, chat, work on a whiteboard, share documents and more!
Numerous new features for better collaboration
New desktop app
No more searching through browser tabs! The new app offers desktop integration and notifications, allowing users to communicate and join calls effortlessly.
New AI features
Tired of taking notes in long meetings? Enjoy our automatically generated summaries of video meetings! Dreading those 173 unread messages in the morning? The Nextcloud Assistant summarizes them for you. Less work, less stress!
Visual collaboration
The interactive whiteboard enables teams to brainstorm and develop ideas in real-time – ideal for workshops and project planning.
Plan your polls
You can now save a poll as a draft, for quick publishing when the class has started. Need to use the same poll in a different class? Simply export it as a file and import it in the new room. At the end, export the poll as image or spreadsheet. Easy as pie!
Simplified teamwork
Documents can be collaboratively edited directly within chats or video calls. No need to switch to another window or tab! You can easily find chat messages with the search, leave and join open chat rooms or archive the ones you no longer follow, so you stay as connected as you need to be.
Let colleagues know what you think with reactions to chat messages, or animated reactions during calls. And if you need to make a point, you can use bold, italics, headers and even tables in your messages.
Mindfulness features
To promote a healthy meeting culture, Nextcloud Talk has a series of small features that help you be mindful of yourself and others. You can send silent chat messages and even start silent calls which don’t send notifications to everyone. User status communicates to colleagues if you’re available or not – the status will automatically change when you are in a call or have an appointment in your calendar, and your time zone is visible for others.
Need to deal with something – but not right now? You can mark a chat as unread, but also set a reminder on an individual message. You’ll get a notification at the time you set! You can also send a message to a special ‘Note to self’ chat, or put notes there by hand. Keep things organized for yourself. Perhaps favorite your Note to self chat so it’s always on top with other important chats?
You can also set your work hours and enable do-not-disturb outside those hours. Calls give a warning at the 1h mark and can now automatically end after a set time. And, during calls, you can see how much each participant talked so you can make sure even the quiet team members get to have their say.
High-security communication
Nextcloud Talk meets the highest security standards and can even be deployed in airgap environments, keeping all communication strictly away from the internet.
Discover more new features
Calls:
Summarize Call recordings automatically with AI
Enforce a maximum call lenght
Option to always disable devices by default
Option to download a call participants list
Option to blur background by default
Chat:
Summary of chat histories when there are many unread messages
Option to directly download attachments
Highlight file and object shares with an icon in conversations list
Guests:
Identify and recognize guests invited via mail address
Allow inviting email guests when creating a conversation
Conversations:
Option to archive conversations
Automatically lock rooms after days of inactivity
Voice Messages:
Auto play voice messages which are grouped together
Polls:
Draft, import and export polls
A glimpse into the future of collaboration
With Nextcloud Talk, we empower companies and public institutions to work securely and productively – regardless of their location or infrastructure. The platform is ideal for on premise installations or hosting by local cloud providers, giving companies and organizations full control over their data.
Finally, the open source community has a real answer to Microsoft Teams.
AI tools woven into the big tech ecosystems, some more “open” than others, some more quiet, often require a silent sacrifice in exchange for easy-to-access technology. An alternative is open-source AI models which, much like open-source software, have a potential to give you more transparency and control.
You can study and even modify the model you are using, and if you don’t need that — at least understand how your data is processed, stored and shared. Sounds like something the viral AI photo editing apps can’t promise, yet millions keep giving them access to their private photos every day.
Join us as we explore how open-source AI benefits users and, from the perspective of our Ethical AI rating, provide examples of AI models that can help you reclaim your privacy.
What are open-source AI models?
With more people becoming aware of how data economy works, earning user’s trust becomes more challenging to the AI providers. To appeal to more conscious users, many AI vendors label their technology open or open-source. But without consensus on what open-source AI is, such open-washing could raise many risks: surveillance, information bias, effects on the labor market and creative industries, and excessive energy usage — to name a few.
In attempt to battle the potentially harmful trend, the Open Source Initiative released its official Open Source Artificial Intelligence Definition (OSAID). According to the OSAID, an Open Source AI is an AI system made available under terms and in a way that grant the freedoms to:
Use the system for any purpose and without having to ask for permission.
Study how the system works and inspect its components.
Modify the system for any purpose, including to change its output.
Share the system for others to use with or without modifications, for any purpose.
Even though the work on this definition has been endorsed by many companies and individuals, there’s no consensus in the community on whether or not to accept it in its current state, or if the open-source AI is even ready to be defined.
We too think there’s room for improvement. But with or without concrete definition for the OS AI, we can tell how four main freedoms of open-source – to use, to study, to modify, and to share – can impact life of the the AI users.
How do users benefit from open-source AI?
Open source promotes freedom and empowers users to control their software – in this case, the AI – they rely on. Here are several examples of opens-source AI systems could directly benefit you as a user:
Proprietary AI can include hidden features like data harvesting for advertising and user profiling, embedded biases, and using your private data to refine the products without your consent. Open-source lets you make sure there are no hidden features or data backdoors – because you (and thousands, or even millions of others) can inspect the source code and understand how the software operates.
If your software is not anymore supported by a provider, you may lose valuable data like your AI’s memory of interactions. And even though normally you can export this data, there’s no guarantee it will be compatible with alternative models. With open-source, you don’t rely on a single vendor – the software will continue to exist, and you will retain full ownership. Moreover, you are not locked in the provider’s ecosystem of applications in order to fully benefit from their AI, no-one controls your costs, your updates and maintenance.
You can host your AI yourself or with a provider you trust, which means you fully control your data, make own decisions for your privacy, and maintain your compliance instead of relying on third-party services.
Nextcloud Ethical AI rating
At Nextcloud, we employ and integrate AI tools ourselves and we realize the risks brought by the evolving computer intelligence. That’s why we created the Ethical AI Rating that helps our users make the right decisions about what AI models to use in their work. It is more granular than the OSAID and more critical in areas like training data availability. For now, we will keep using it as it resonates with the unique needs of Nextcloud users.
Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating is based on three principles:
Whether the training data is available and is free to use
Whether the software (both for inferencing and training) is open-source
Whether the trained model freely available for self-hosting
Based on how many of the criteria are met, a model receives Red , Orange , Yellow or Green rating.
Looking for open-source AI models to try? Consider these!
Nextcloud is not primarily an AI developer or vendor, so we don’t promote any AI products. Instead, we want to help our users choose the right tools to protect their privacy, and where needed, help them start using those tools through Nextcloud Hub. From the perspective of our Ethical AI Rating, here are several AI models that help you take control of your privacy.
Open-source LLMs via LocalAI
With LocalAI, you can use several open-source models like GPT-Neo or GPT-J, running them locally with ability to modify and interact with them on your server. In this case, the app also gets the Green rating in our Ethical AI rating, fully meeting the criteria.
OpenNMT
OpenNMT is a fully open-source AI translation framework available under MIT license. In Nextcloud, it can be used via LibreTranslate app that offers translation via your own server/API key.
Opus
Opus is a machine translation provider by University of Helsinki that runs locally on CPU and doesn’t let any private data leaves your servers. It meets all criteria of our rating.
GPT4All Falcon by Nomic AI
GPT4All Falcon is an LLM that combines the Falcon language model with the GPT4All interface. It is available under Apache 2.0 license and runs locally on CPU.
There are models that do not match the criteria of the Green rating, but can be worth considering since they are self-hosted and have very permissive licenses, making them mostly safe to run locally:
Self-hosted Stable Diffusion
Stable Diffusion is open-source model licensed under CreativeML Open RAIL-M License. Users have full access to the model and its code, can modify and redistribute it, given that it’s an on premise version. In Nextcloud, self-hosted Stable Diffusion can be used via LocalAI. We give it a Yellow rating, as the training data is not freely available in this case.
Whisper
In Nextcloud, you can use Whisper to enable speech-to-text conversion features. Whisper is available under the MIT License and has a Yellow rating due to limited availability of the training data.
Llama 2
Llama 2 is a free LLM by Meta that can be run on premise, and the software for training and inference of this model is open source. However, the training data is not freely available. It is offered under Llama 2 Community License.
We don’t limit our users’ choice of AI tools, and there are other models and apps that you can integrate in Nextcloud Hub and use with Nextcloud Assistant, including self-hosted models like NeuralBeagle14 7B, Smaug-72B and Meta’s Llama 3. Or famous AI like ChatGPT, DALL·E or Aleph Alpha – which are far from meeting all the criteria of our rating, but you still can easily integrate them in Nextcloud if you wish.
Build your own private AI platform – with Nextcloud Hub
Nextcloud Assistant is the first local AI assistant built into collaboration platform. It is integrated everywhere across Nextcloud Hub, helping you with your daily tasks while taking care of your privacy. Among tools supported by Nextcloud Assistant are chat with AI, text and image generation, email summaries, translation, dictation, inquiring about your own data with Context Chat, automated document creation with Context Write, and much more.
You can integrate AI models of your choice to enable those tools, creating a custom AI-powered environment according to your your privacy and security needs. And if needed, you can host your AI with one of the trusted SaaS providers in Europe, staying fully compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR and others.
Get Nextcloud Hub
AI-powered open-source collaboration platform that puts you back in control over your data.
On the eve of the Open Source Experience, we invite you to the Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris, Nextcloud’s flagship event for professionals. An afternoon of discussions, networking, inspiring presentations, and exclusive announcements awaits you, featuring open-source leaders and experts in collaborative solutions.
Inspiring keynotes and an big Nextcloud Talk announcement
The Enterprise Day Paris kicks off with a keynote from our CEO and founder, Frank Karlitschek. He shares our vision for the future our vision for the future of online collaboration, followed by a major announcement for Nextcloud Talk! This is your chance to learn more about our latest innovations and ask all your questions directly to Frank Karlitschek and the Nextcloud team.
Next, hear inspiring testimonials from clients and partners as they share their success stories and real-world experiences with Nextcloud. These discussions, held in both English and French, provide a great opportunity to explore the benefits of Nextcloud in a variety of contexts.
Keep on reading for the full program of the Nextcloud Enterprise Day!
A networking space to connect with our experts
During the entire day, our networking space will give you a chance to connect with Nextcloud experts ready to advise you and answer all your questions, as well as our key partners and sponsors of the event.
The Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris is not just a networking event — it’s an opportunity to learn from the success of industry professionals, share your own experiences, and engage with the team behind Nextcloud.
The Nextcloud Enterprise Day experience includes:
Insights into the Nextcloud roadmap and an exclusive preview of the upcoming major update of Nextcloud Talk.
A deep dive into the new features and improvements that will help you boost your instance.
AI in Nextcloud: The most requested developments and the latest features to enhance your platform.
Real-world case studies presented by Nextcloud users from various industries and different types of businesses.
Strategies for optimizing your platform for peak performance with the Nextcloud leadership team.
A friendly meet-up with peers, industry leaders, and experts to expand your network and foster collaborations.
Exclusive Q&A session and a chance to meet with Nextcloud’s Senior Management.
Great location in the heart of Paris
The event will be held at Espace La Rochefoucauld, a modern and accessible venue in the heart of Paris. Located just steps away from major transport routes, this space is an ideal place for rich and inspiring exchanges, in a city that embodies both tradition and innovation.
The Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris will take place on Tuesday, December 3, 2024. The main program will run from 1:30 PM to 6:00 PM CET, with regular breaks for refreshments and networking.
The day will conclude with a casual cocktail reception. The tentative program below will be regularly updated on the dedicated Nextcloud Enterprise Day Paris page.
13:00
Welcome reception for participants, coffee and tea. Meet our partners and Nextcloud experts.
13:30
Welcome: Introduction to Nextcloud by Frank Karlitschek, CEO and Founder of Nextcloud.
14:00
“Connecter un Demi-Million de personne avec Leviia et Nextcloud” – Guy Daroles, Project Director at Monlycee.net and William Meauzoone, Co-founder Leviia”
14:20
“Nextcloud basé sur MariaDB : Une solution évolutive et hautement disponible” – Sebastien Giraud, Senior Solution Engineer at MariaDB
14:40
Break and networking
15:10
Nextcloud Talk Keynote
15:40
“EUniWell adopte Nextcloud en mode SaaS avec TAS Cloud Services pour la collaboration à distance de ses 11 Universités Européennes” – Youssef Araqi Houssaini and Matthieu Charton.”
16:00
“Bridging Nextcloud with Microsoft via Sendent” – Richard Marx, Co-founder at Sendent
16:20
Break and networking
16:50
“Libérez vos Documents” – Car Méven, Software Engineer at Collabora
17:10
“Ayming : Nextcloud un remplaçant de SharePoint dans le secteur privé” – Xavier Quilliet, CIO at Ayming and Guy-Christian Facia, Consultant at Arawa
17:30
“Présentation des solutions XWiki et de leur intégration dans Nextcloud” – Clément Aubin, Sales Director at Xwiki
18:00 21:00
Cocktails
Meet our sponsors and partners
We are thrilled to be supported by trusted sponsors: MariaDB, Arawa, IONOS, Leviia, and TAS Cloud Services. Come meet them at the event to discover their offerings and learn how they strengthen the Nextcloud ecosystem.
Book your place now to make sure you don’t miss out on Enterprise Day Paris.
Nextcloud has been recognized with the World Summit Award Germany in the Government & Citizen Engagement category. WSA selects and promotes local digital innovation improving society, aiming to contribute to the United Nations’ agenda of sustainable development goals. In addition, Nextcloud is shortlisted for the World Summit Awards on a global level. The winners will be announced in January 2025.
What this award means for Nextcloud
The digital collaboration platform has been recognized for excelling in data sovereignty and giving customers and users control over their data. Nextcloud builds an open source platform for people to store their files, chat and videoconference, manage calendars, emails and more, that is not run by a single entity. Using a web interface and mobile apps, users don’t have to hand over their data to anybody else. Users, companies and governments can use Nextcloud software to build their own clouds, in a very easy way. And – hundreds of thousands have.
Data is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of companies. This is not good for society – especially with the rise of AI. Privacy is the foundation of democracy and society does not function well if all communication and collaboration is mediated by a few democratically unaccountable entities.
Frank Karlitschek
Founder and CEO of Nextcloud
Digital sovereignty for millions of users
Nextcloud is deeply rooted in the open source community and has become the most popular self-hosted alternative to the collaboration platforms of big tech companies. There are an estimated 500,000 servers on the internet running Nextcloud, some of these with millions of users. We do not track users but estimate to have between 25 and 50 million users in total.
For the business side, besides companies and other organzations, more than 600 EU institutions, federal and state ministries, as well as city and local governments globally rely on Nextcloud, including Germany, France, the Netherlands, Serbia, Canada, Australia, Brazil and the USA. The most popular self-hosted collaboration solution for 2 million users in the public sector and tens of millions of users overall around the globe.
To help the German public sector digitalise their services for citizens, Nextcloud has rolled out several efforts. Latest example is the launch of Nextcloud Flow, the first fully open source, integrated process automation platform.
WSA awards digital solutions with impact on society
The World Summit Awards (WSA) aim to promote the best digital solutions with impact on society. It is a non-monetary award system with a focus on sustainable knowledge transfer through a worldwide network. The award was launched in 2003 and aims to contribute to the United Nations’ agenda of sustainable development goals by recognizing local digital content with societal impact and showcasing the wealth and diversity of innovative applications.
We had to pull version 29.0.9 due to issues with PDF display. It will be fixed in December maintenance release for Nextcloud 29.
Please update to a new version to keep your data safe!
If you are using Nextcloud Hub 7 or 9, we strongly recommend you to update to version 28.0.12 or 30.0.2 respectively. Maintenance updates include important bug fixes, stability and security upgrades. It is a quick and safe process, as always!
About the updates
The updates include a number of important bug fixes and performance optimization, as well as other improvements in all supported Nextcloud Hub versions. You can find the full changelog on our website.
Nextcloud Hub 9 lets you stay connected like never before: federated calls, auto-magic with Nextcloud Flow, collaboration through a new medium with Nextloud Whiteboard, a big design redo and much more!
What’s new in Nextcloud Hub 9:
Federation: Edit documents and have video calls with users from other Nextcloud servers!
Nextcloud’s minor releases primarily focus on addressing security vulnerabilities and functionality bugs, avoiding major system overhauls that could jeopardize user data. Keeping your server up to date is vital, and our approach to testing and validation ensures that upgrading to minor releases is generally smooth and reliable.
For mission-critical Nextcloud systems in enterprise settings, consider switching to Nextcloud Enterprise. The tier provides you with ultimate deployment confidence: direct access to the Nextcloud engineering team, full assistance throughout deployment and integration, and peace of mind for system administrators. If you’re responsible for maintaining Nextcloud in your setting, this option may be the ideal solution for you.
One week is left until Nextcloud Enterprise day, and good things come to those who wait! As you are planning your trip to Frankfurt, we are happy to announce an amazing talk by Dr. Frank Dengler.
Speaker: Frank Dengler, CEO and founder of audriga
Title: Migrating from SharePoint to Nextcloud: What we’ve learned
Transitioning the organization’s collaborative environment from SharePoint to Nextcloud is a complex project, successfully undertaken by organizations like Swiss Bank and the Schleswig-Holstein state administration. How exactly do you make such a migration both achievable and efficient? Dr. Dengler argues that a well-prepared and structured approach is key to a successful migration, and he is going to share some of his insights in this special session.
Join Nextcloud Enterprise Day on November 6 in Frankfurt, Germany. Register today!
Get your ticket at the best price
Tickets to Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Frankfurt are limited.
Secure your seat today and don’t miss out!
audriga is a globally recognized expert in email, groupware, and storage migration. They support companies of all sizes, including hosting providers and telcos, with white-label self-service solutions for customer onboarding and large-scale platform migrations involving millions of user accounts. audriga can migrate almost any type of data, such as files, contacts, calendar, tasks, metadata, and settings, between virtually any systems — including migrations from SharePoint to Nextcloud.
Frank Dengler is a co-founder and currently serve as the CEO of audriga. His professional journey began at Intel, where he worked as a consultant in the server and data center division. He holds an interdisciplinary degree in Information Engineering and Management, as well as a PhD in Knowledge Management, both from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
audriga chose Nextcloud because we noticed a growing demand from customers seeking a strong alternative to SharePoint. Nextcloud stands out as a great option, not only for its robust file management capabilities but also for its additional features like collaboration tools, integrated apps, and data control, making it a comprehensive solution beyond just file storage.
About Nextcloud Enterprise Day
Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.
From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.
The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany on November 6.
Join the conversation in Frankfurt!
Click below to explore the full program, location and registration information
A provider of leading open-source database solutions, MariaDB makes data easier to access and lets users focus on growing their business while being confident in their database’s resilience. A long-standing partnership between Nextcloud and MariaDB enables scalability and high availability of solutions for Nextcloud customers. We are proud to welcome MariaDB as a sponsor of the most important event for Nextcloud’s enterprise users.
Nextcloud Enterprise Day takes place on November 6 in Frankfurt, Germany. Register today to secure your spot!
Register for Nextcloud Enterprise Day today to secure your spot!
MariaDB seeks to eliminate the constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling organizations to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. Enterprises can depend on a single complete database for all their needs, that can be deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases.
Trusted by organizations such as Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Red Hat, ServiceNow and Samsung – MariaDB delivers customer value without the financial burden of legacy database providers.
About Nextcloud Enterprise Day
Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.
From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.
The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.
We are excited to announce SpaceNet as a sponsor of the Nextcloud Enterprise Day taking place on November 6 in Frankfurt, Germany!
With a track record extending over three decades, SpaceNet is now a leading provider of private, sovereign infrastructure solutions in Germany. As a Nextcloud Gold Partner, SpaceNet delivers a comprehensive range of Nextcloud hosting solutions. These services meet many business demands, from highly standardized cloud services ready for immediate use, to customized installations uniquely tailored to individual client requirements.
Positioned in the heart of Munich, Germany, SpaceNet’s data centers are at the forefront of managed Nextcloud offerings. This strategic location not only aligns with the stringent European data protection standards but also reinforces the commitment to providing robust security, supreme efficiency, and complete control over your data.
Register for the Nextcloud Enterprise Day today to secure your spot!
Register for Nextcloud Enterprise Day today to secure your spot!
SpaceNet is a Munich-based provider of managed services and data center solutions that prioritizes security and performance while strongly aligning with GDPR standards and principles. In acknowledgment of the distinct challenges each business faces, SpaceNet offers customized solutions tailored to the unique needs of their clients. SpaceNet has earned the trust of industry leaders such as MVV, Utopia.de, and Antenne Bayern, a testament to the commitment to excellence and innovation in IT solutions.
Providing secure hosting in Germany, SpaceNet contributes to the initiative to build a digitally sovereign European IT. A Gold Partner of Nextcloud, SpaceNet expands its offering with powerful capabilities of Nextcloud. Nextcloud is also a part of Zamadama, the self-service collaboration platform by SpaceNet. Managed Nextcloud is offered both as an immediately available standardised cloud solution and as a customised installation to fit individual requirements.
About Nextcloud Enterprise Day
Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.
From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.
The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.
Nextcloud has been awarded Platinum at the IT Awards 2024! This proves once again that love and support of our community is everything. Today, we celebrate this win together!
This recognition, decided by thousands of IT professionals, reflects the trust that our community places in us. It’s an incredible acknowledgment of our efforts to provide a secure, open-source, and flexible platform.
The IT Awards, hosted by Vogel IT Media, celebrate outstanding IT solutions across various categories. Being recognized in this highly competitive contest is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our entire team.
At Nextcloud, our mission is to enable individuals and organizations to regain control of their data through solutions that prioritize data sovereignty and privacy. Winning the Platinum Award strengthens our commitment to this vision, showing that our approach resonates with users and professionals alike.
We are deeply grateful to our community, partners, and customers for their continued support. Your trust drives us to keep innovating and delivering solutions that meet the evolving demands of modern digital collaboration. We look forward to continuing this journey together, building a more open and secure digital future.
Federation offers a solution to the challenges posed by centrally controlled public cloud applications by letting users communicate and collaborate between independent servers and even independent apps. In this article, we explain how federation works, what features you can use withfederation in Nextcloud, and discover how it can help businesses and governments achieve digital sovereignty.
Whether you’re new to federation features or already familiar with them, let’s start with the basics.
Understanding the federated internet
It’s a well-known fact that on-premises software offers more autonomy compared to public cloud tools in several ways, largely due to the level of control organizations have over their infrastructure and data. Self-hosting is a definition of decentralization in the realm of collaborative technologies. An important question arises when considering self-hosting: how can we collaborate effectively using decentralized software?
The answer lies in federation – it’s the key to making decentralized collaboration possible. To understand federation, you need to ask yourself – how does email work? Email is, in fact, federation in action: it operates through a network of independent servers connected via standard protocols and allowing users from different domains to exchange messages with ease via single client.
Or take Mastodon, a federated social network where each instance is a separate server run by an independent entity or community. Each user can sign up on an instance they prefer, and then follow, reply to, or message users on other instances, making communication across the entire network seamless.
In Nextcloud, user’s Federated Cloud ID works similar to an email address or a Mastodon handle, allowing them to exchange data across servers: share files and and collaborate on documents, communicate in group chats and make audio and video calls.
Federation and digital sovereignty
Federation enables private users, organizations, and their departments to use independent infrastructure, hosting their software locally with customized security and compliance measures. Each entity operates its own platform while staying connected to a larger network that supports cross-server collaboration. This decentralized architecture reduces reliance on a single service provider. It also frees you from vendor lock-in, allowing you to choose a trusted provider and work with the software that meets your needs, all while retaining the ability to collaborate seamlessly across different platforms.
Regulators are responding to a growing backlash against big tech firms from users who perceive their behaviour as market abuse, with the term ‘malicious compliance’ being used. This trend causes a growing interest in decentralization technologies.
Frank Karlitschek
Nextcloud founder
Finally, self-hosting with federated features gives you full ownership and control over your data. You choose your own encryption and own access controls, or get more flexible where others can’t, pursuing only your own compliance objectives. Companies and governments can avoid numerous risks by not having to store data under unfavourable regulations, break free from the privacy terms of large cloud providers, and enjoy freedom without being controlled by foreign entities.
Federation in Nextcloud
In Nextcloud Hub, it is already possible to do a lot when it comes to federated collaboration, as we mentioned above. For example, you can share files across servers and even collaborate on them, while federation in Nextcloud Talk enables you to join group chats and run meetings on another server.
Besides better security, easier compliance and more independence, there’s also convenience: you don’t need to send invites or create guest accounts, or set up your own on somebody’s instance. Just use your own account and stay within familiar interface of your home platform — you won’t even notice any difference.
Sure, there are certain limitations, for example, you can’t create private federated chats in Nextcloud Talk yet. But we already support many essential and handy features like polls, markdown and user mentions. And federation in Nextcloud constantly evolves as we explore more abilities of the Federated Cloud Sharing API.
OCM, a foundation for federation features in Nextcloud
Federated Cloud Sharing API in Nexctloud has been invented by Nextcloud founders Frank Karlitschek and Bjoern Schießle. It is a collaboratively developed standard that is a part of Open Cloud Mesh (OCM), an initiative of the GÉANT Association, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education.
Federated tools available in Nextcloud
Federated file sharing
Share documents and media to users in other Nextcloud Hub instances for viewing, editing and collaboration.
Federated chatting
Create group chats with users from different servers and use many essential chat tools.
Federated calls
Make audio and video calls with Nextcloud Talk among users from different servers.
How to configure federated features in your Nextcloud Hub
If you wish to configure and manage federation tools in your Nextcloud, you need to enable the Federation app and follow a few easy steps:
Enable the Federation app.
Allow your users to share and receive files from other servers.
Create a list of trusted servers to enable federation features for them.
Federated calls and more amazing features in Nextcloud Hub 9
With Nextcloud Hub 9, we introduced federated calls in Nextcloud Talk, as well as multiple other exciting features across the entire platform. The latest update lets you stay connected like never before — with new automation features, Nextcloud Whiteboard, new tools in Nextcloud Assistant, improved Nexcloud Mail and Nextcloud Calendar, and much more.
New to Nextcloud? There’s no better time to try it out! Get control over your data today with the most secure open-source collaboration platform.
Sometimes you need to illustrate graphically what words cannot convey. And with a digital whiteboard tool, you don’t need drawing or design skills to do that. Read on to discover Nextcloud Whiteboard, a brand new app among Nextcloud’s collaborative tools launched with Nextcloud Hub 9.
Nextcloud Whiteboard, an online digital whiteboard
Digital whiteboards, just like their analogue predecessors, are useful in many settings from a classroom to a busy team meeting. For instance, you can use a whiteboard during a brainstorming session to sketch, map out strategies, or visualize workflows. Or assist your project planning by outlining project timelines, assigning tasks, and tracking progress. Whiteboards are also essential to online teaching and training, allowing educators to make lessons more engaging and dynamic by providing a space to interact, annotate, and visualize concepts together.
With Nextcloud Whiteboard, you can do all of that within your own secure environment and while enjoying seamless integration in your file system and video conferencing tools.
Nextcloud Whiteboard is a collaborative whiteboard tool featuring hand-drawn style that is based on Excalidraw app. It lets you enjoy lots of editing features and support for images, web embeds, shapes and other objects. You can easily save and share entire whiteboards and separate sketches to share ideas or invite your team to work together. Nextcloud Whiteboard is a part of our Nextcloud Office bundle that features various universal collaborative tools for editing and data processing in Nextcloud Hub.
Infinite canvas and a variety of instruments
Nextcloud Whiteboard has unlimited canvas, meaning that you can create as many sketches, schemes and illustrations as you need, all in one file. You can invite dozens of users to collaborate with you and let them enjoy their own space on the whiteboard, or move from one task to another without having to wipe clean your valuable ideas.
Many elements, including simple lines, shapes and texts, are designed to resemble hand drawings, adding a relaxed mood to your whiteboards and letting you create freely without worrying about perfection. What matters is your ideas and an ability to express them, and Nextcloud Whiteboard has plenty of tools to make that possible.
Watch a free Nextcloud Whiteboard webinar
On October 17, we are hosting a webinar “Nextcloud Whiteboard: Improve team collaboration for better results”. Join the webinar to learn about use cases, watch a live demo and ask any questions about Nextcloud Whiteboard.
Where do we start? No need to look for the Nextcloud Whiteboard icon on your toolbar — it opens automatically when you create or open a whiteboard file. To start using Nextcloud Whiteboard from your file system, you just need to create a new whiteboard file from your “+” menu.
Launch a whiteboard in Nextcloud Talk
Want to work in a whiteboard during a Nextcloud Talk call? You don’t need to go looking for a blank file — just create it right from the attachment menu of the chat. As usual, you can pick one of the available templates to save time coming up with the structure. Once created, the new whiteboard appears in the chat, accessible to all participants.
Host engaging, interactive meetings
We introduced Nextcloud Whiteboard integration features in Nextcloud Talk to enable a variety of new ways to use our video conferencing platform. For example, you can turn your meeting into a virtual classroom or organize an interactive online workshop. Thanks to infinite canvas space, you can use one whiteboard for many different tasks, no matter the scale and number of collaborators.
When you open or create a whiteboard file from the attachment menu, Nextcloud Whiteboard will open the canvas in front of you, without showing it to other participants in your video stream. To join you in editing, they need to click on the whiteboard file inside the conversation and activate their own editor. Now you can start collaborating in real time right inside your group chat, or present your digital whiteboard to others live (make sure to try the Laser Pointer tool!).
Create free drawings
You can draw anything with a hand drawing tool and apply settings like line color, automatic background fill type and color for drawn objects, opacity, and stroke width. The brush is dynamic: it reacts to your motions and drawing speed as you draw, making it look and feel like a real hand drawing!
Build and customize shapes
To save time drawing your schemes and sketches, you can use one of the available shape presets: rectangle, diamond and circle. Once created you can adjust the shape’s appearance by configuring its settings in the left panel.
You can also save shapes and other objects to your personal library to reuse them later, or add shapes created by other users to Nextcloud Whiteboard from Excalidraw library.
Draw schemes with lines and arrows
Arrows and lines in Nextcloud Whiteboard give you a lot of freedom. You can stick them to other objects to preserve scheme structure no matter how you change their positions, bind them freely and as many times as you wish, and even add labels.
You can create a straight arrow or line quickly by pressing your cursor and simply dragging the arrow’s end. To create a complex, bound arrow or line, click on the starting point once to begin drawing, and then lead your line by clicking on each location where you want it to bind. If you hover it near an object while drawing, you can stick it to that object in the desired place.
Perform various actions with objects and lines
You can perform various actions with drawn objects and lines. For example, adjust multiple stroke and shape settings, change color, duplicate them, add hyperlinks, and more. You can also click on an object to rotate, resize and reshape it the way you want to, and even move the pivot points of your lines.
Once your digital whiteboard grows complex, rearranging your objects and sketches might become difficult (and messy!). But Frame tool has got you covered — you can enable it from the right menu of the top toolbar and group any objects you desire in a frame to perform bulk actions with ease.
Type and format texts
Using text tool, you can add any texts to your whiteboards. If you don’t like the default hand-drawn look of the font, you can change the font family to Normal or Code. You can also change the text alignment and opacity and, of course, it’s color. Don’t worry if you made a typo — texts stay editable after saving.
Embed pictures and videos
Using image tool, upload an image or simply drag and image file onto the whiteboard to add it to your canvas. You can also add videos and other web objects using the Web Embed tool from the rightmost drop-down menu of the toolbar.
Save and share your digital whiteboard
You can quickly export your whiteboards and even separate objects as JPG or SVG images to share, embed, print or upload them anywhere you want. Just click the small menu icon on your left and export your content as an image with desired display settings. You can also simply copy it co clipboard to quickly share it in an email or chat without downloading.
You can share your whiteboards in Nextcloud Hub to team members or external collaborators to invite them for collaboration or demonstrate your ideas, just like you share any other files. This is possible with the sidebar share menu where you can choose recipients, secure your link with passwords, set expiry date and apply other protection settings, instantly share the file via email, and much more.
Be connected with Nextcloud Hub 9!
Nextcloud Whiteboard is only one of the exciting new apps and features released together with Nextcloud Hub 9. With the latest update, Nextcloud Hub lets you stay connected like never before — with new automation features, federated calls, new tools in Nextcloud Assistant, improved Nexcloud Mail and Nextcloud Calendar, and much more.
Note: Nextcloud Whiteboard is a part of the Ultimate tier of Nextcloud Enterprise. Contact us to get a quote. Learn more about Nextcloud Enterprise on the dedicated page.
New to Nextcloud? There’s no better time to try it out! Get control over your data today with the most secure open-source collaboration platform.
Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Frankfurt is approaching, and we are thrilled to announce a new keynote speaker — Felix Gebauer of Schleswig-Holstein state administration. Read below to find out more about the the speaker and the exciting session.
Speaker: Felix Gebauer, Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software in the Schleswig-Holstein German state administration
Keynote title: Schleswig-Holstein and Nextcloud: Driving digital transformation through collaboration, automation and artificial intelligence
This topic will explore how Nextcloud is driving digital transformation in Schleswig-Holstein’s government, exploring several examples including new ways of collaboration, process automation, artificial intelligence and the OZG (Onlinezugangsgesetz) implementation.
Secure your ticket at the best price
Tickets to Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Frankfurt are limited.
Secure your seat today and don’t miss out!
Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost state in Germany. Part of the State Chancellery of Schleswig-Holstein is the Central IT-Management department. They are responsible for the provision and operation of the centralized IT infrastructure for the whole state administration. They’re made up of 25,000 employees – one including Felix Gebauer, the Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software.
Mr. Gebauer is responsible for the successful implementation of Schleswig-Holstein’s open source strategy. It’s his job to introduce Nextcloud as the new key collaboration platform to the state administration and ensure its roll-out of Nextcloud.
“The main reasons for choosing Nextcloud were the wide distribution of Nextcloud especially in public administration, Nextcloud’s strong and active community, and the wide range of different collaboration features within Nextcloud which provide solutions for many use cases in Schleswig-Holstein’s state administration.”
Felix Gebauer, Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software in the Schleswig-Holstein
Building a digitally sovereign AI for the public sector
As part of the AI strategy of the German state, they are collaborating with Nextcloud to create a generative language model for the state administration that is adapted to the specifics of administrative texts. Minister of Digitization and Head of the State Chancellery Dirk Schrödter backs the collaboration in a statement:
“In the future, we will make AI services available to colleagues in the state administration directly at the workplace. We want to drive the development of digitally sovereign and open solutions in addition to the use of existing AI services. Because, the administration of the future will work in an automated, algortihmized, cloudified and data-based way. To make this vision of the future a reality, we must provide the appropriate tools. This also creates value and jobs in our domestic digital economy.”
Dirk Schrödter, Minister of Digitization and Head of the State Chancellery
Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.
From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.
The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are limited.
Join the conversation in Frankfurt!
Click below to explore the full program, location and registration information
Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Frankfurt is approaching, and we are thrilled to announce a new keynote speaker — Felix Gebauer of Schleswig-Holstein state administration. Read below to find out more about the the speaker and the exciting session.
Speaker: Felix Gebauer, Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software in the Schleswig-Holstein German state administration
Keynote title: Schleswig-Holstein and Nextcloud: Driving digital transformation through collaboration, automation and artificial intelligence
This topic will explore how Nextcloud is driving digital transformation in Schleswig-Holstein’s government, exploring several examples including new ways of collaboration, process automation, artificial intelligence and the OZG (Onlinezugangsgesetz) implementation.
Secure your ticket at the best price
Tickets to Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Frankfurt are limited.
Secure your seat today and don’t miss out!
Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost state in Germany. Part of the State Chancellery of Schleswig-Holstein is the Central IT-Management department. They are responsible for the provision and operation of the centralized IT infrastructure for the whole state administration. They’re made up of 25,000 employees – one including Felix Gebauer, the Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software.
Mr. Gebauer is responsible for the successful implementation of Schleswig-Holstein’s open source strategy. It’s his job to introduce Nextcloud as the new key collaboration platform to the state administration and ensure its roll-out of Nextcloud.
“The main reasons for choosing Nextcloud were the wide distribution of Nextcloud especially in public administration, Nextcloud’s strong and active community, and the wide range of different collaboration features within Nextcloud which provide solutions for many use cases in Schleswig-Holstein’s state administration.”
Felix Gebauer, Program Lead and Project Manager for the transition to Open-Source Software in the Schleswig-Holstein
Building a digitally sovereign AI for the public sector
As part of the AI strategy of the German state, they are collaborating with Nextcloud to create a generative language model for the state administration that is adapted to the specifics of administrative texts. Minister of Digitization and Head of the State Chancellery Dirk Schrödter backs the collaboration in a statement:
“In the future, we will make AI services available to colleagues in the state administration directly at the workplace. We want to drive the development of digitally sovereign and open solutions in addition to the use of existing AI services. Because, the administration of the future will work in an automated, algortihmized, cloudified and data-based way. To make this vision of the future a reality, we must provide the appropriate tools. This also creates value and jobs in our domestic digital economy.”
Dirk Schrödter, Minister of Digitization and Head of the State Chancellery
Nextcloud Enterprise Day is our top event of the year for business leaders, decision-makers, and project managers to achieve their goals with Nextcloud.
From customer presentations and success stories to networking opportunities and access to management, sales, marketing, and engineering teams, you’re bound to walk away with new information, techniques, and inspiration.
The upcoming edition takes place at the spectacular Radisson Blu hotel in Frankfurt, Germany. Early Bird tickets are available until October 5th 2024.
Join the conversation in Frankfurt!
Click below to explore the full program, location and registration information
AI technology has become too useful and accessible to ignore, so more and more users make the choice to sacrifice tomorrow’s privacy for the sake of an excellent result today.
At Nextcloud, we believe that everybody deserves privacy. We released the first open-source AI assistant that is hosted where you want it to be. It can get a multitude of tasks done inside your content collaboration platform without compromising your data: in content writing, mail communication, team chats, and more.
Introducing Nextcloud AI Assistant
Nextcloud AI Assistant is a capable and versatile tool that enhances your work throughout Nextcloud Hub to keep writing, communication, and other productivity tasks simple and low effort.
Unlike other AI-powered content collaboration tools, Nextcloud doesn’t share your data with a third party technology provider to train the core AI model. This means that all data you work with, including documents, emails, chats and more, stays yours.
How do we accomplish that?
We build the AI Assistant using a flexible, solution-independent approach which gives you a choice between multiple large language models (LLM) and services. It can be fully hosted within your instance, processing all requests in-house, or powered by an external service. This enables unmatched capabilities of language processing across various use scenarios with control of what is running behind your instruments and how. And importantly, you can have a 100% open-source assistant.
Nextcloud AI Assistant features are available in the main Nextcloud Hub navigation to help you with quick text tasks, and in several apps including Text, Mail, and soon Talk, for app-specific actions.
If you want to read about other AI tools available in Nextcloud, we welcome you to read the AI features overview or visit our documentation portal.
Quick access from your navigation bar
Whatever you are working on, Nextcloud AI Assistant is only one click away. Should you need any help with a small task like generating a headline, paraphrasing a text, or translating a sentence, just click on a icon on the top right corner of the main navigation and give the Assistant its input.
More and more tools are tools are supported with every new version of Nextcloud Hub. Make sure to check out the Nextcloud Hub 9 release blog to find the latest features!
Chat with Nextcloud Assistant
Nextcloud Assistant becomes even more convenient with a chat interface, where you can give prompts and ask questions in a dialog format. It will remember your conversations, making interactions more natural and smooth. Chat about your day, work on the next press release, or proofread your social media posts — locally on your server and without any data leaks!
Ask it about your own assets
You can ask Nextcloud Assistant aout your own data with Context Chat. To answer questions about your documents and assets, Nextcloud Assistant gets access to data from different apps, for example Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Collectives and even the Analytics app. You can manually define the scope and even limit it to a specific folder or file for more precision.
Here you can enter your prompt.
You can optionally choose what documents should be used
And here are the results!`
Texts written your way
Context Write is another feature of Nextcloud Assistant powered by context awareness. It can derive context from existing files to convey their unique tone, wording, and even structure to create new texts with the data you provide. Tell Nextcloud Assistant about your working experience and give it a nice CV file, and it will create a custom CV for you. Share meeting notes of a discussion, or the transcript generated from a video call in Talk, as well as a report that looks like the one you would like to create. The Assistant goes to work and creates a report similar to your reference – now review it, and done!
Translate with AI
AI translation is available directly from Nextcloud Assistant menu. Translation options are now almost limitless, as we added support for hundreds of languages that app can detect, read and translate to.
Language assistance in Nextcloud Text
With help of the AI Assistant, Text has you covered when it comes to perfecting your writing and text composition. The tool is available right in the text, freeing you from distractions and extra tab journeys.
Once you select a piece of text to get help with, summon the Assistant menu by clicking the icon next to the selected paragraph. You can get a summary of your text, generate an accurate headline, reformulate it, or translate it into another language. If you are happy with the result, insert it in your text in a simple click.
Summaries, replies and reminders in Nextcloud Mail
The Nextcloud Assistant summarizes bulky email threads for you, so you save a hefty amount of time when searching back in your conversations in Mail. All given tasks, suggestions, and questions are displayed in a clear and concise way, so you get an accurate idea of the whole history of communication.
Nextcloud Assistant also generates quick reply suggestions to your incoming emails based on the email texts, letting you quickly respond to them.
Nextcloud Assistant can also check emails to see if the sender expects a reply: If it determines an email needs a follow-up, it will place it in a Follow up section to make sure you don’t forget!
Need help with the answers? Summon the Assistant from the top toolbar to write a response according to your parameters or improve your writing.
Automatic event creation in Nextcloud Calendar
You can create Calendar events from your emails right in the Nextcloud Mail app. Nextcloud Assistant will automatically generate event titles and descriptions, and even the event agenda. No more going back and forth to set up meetings and reminders!
Smart communication in Talk
Nextcloud Assistant is integrated seamlessly in Nextcloud Talk. We designed it to augment your work conversations and help your team in brainstorming, planning, and clearly expressing ideas.
First and foremost, the Assistant will make sure your discussions flow freely with the ability to translate messages, write texts, and generate media as you chat. Some of those features are available through Smart Picker (type “/” and see the magic!).
However, we don’t plan to stop there and we want the Assistant to become a real participant in the conversation. We are gifting the bot the ability to communicate with you in a most human way possible by answering your questions and providing helpful suggestions for the issues on your agenda. For example, you can ask the Assistant to outline an event preparation plan or to draft a marketing campaign for you using real inputs from your very tasks.
Processing data completely on your server
In everything we do, Nextcloud commits to transparency and trust. Working hard to combine comfort with responsible handling of your data, we made all core AI apps in Hub, including the Nextcloud AI Assistant, fully open-source and running locally on your server.
Your data belongs to you, and not a single bit of information is shared with a third party provider to improve performance, study user behavior, or train an AI model.
You may still want to use popular services like ChatGPT and Dall-E, and we are giving you the freedom to do so in Nextcloud. Before making your decision, you can refer to the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating to find out more about how available AI apps in Nextcloud handle your data and estimate the risks related to code availability, deployment options, and access to training data.
Sovereign AI-as-a-Service
We have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves.
The future: dedicated AI for public sector and more
AI is a quickly developing field. One technology that will be important going forward are text generation models optimized for specific tasks. One example is the public sector where employees are working with large amounts of complicated forms.
Together with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein Nextcloud is working to build a digitally sovereign AI model. Its aim is to accelerate the bureaucratic processes in the public sector with ethical AI-powered content collaboration tools.
Minister of Digitization of Schleswig-Holstein and Nextcloud CEO shake hands
The project focuses on crafting a large language model tailored to the specific needs of the offices dealing with state affairs, namely creation of highly standardized texts using accepted language style and wording, optimized search of process-specific information, and other tasks. Anonymized training data provided by the state will be used in its training.
The model in-the-making will be released as Open Source to encourage the adaptation of sovereign, ethical AI within the digitalization strategies of the governments. Context Chat feature, for example, is the first result of our collaboration.
There will be other fine-tuned AI models for Nextcloud appearing over the coming months and years, helping employees in all kinds of specializations with their tasks.
Get Nextcloud Hub
AI-powered content collaboration platform that keeps you in control of your data.
We are launching Nextcloud Hub 9 in Berlin from the Nextcloud Conference, our yearly community contributor and user event. Being here always reminds me of why we started Nextcloud in the first place: putting you back in control over your data.
More and more of our digital lives are controlled by a shrinking number of big tech firms and their CEO’s. We believe there is a better way.
So we designed Nextcloud with decentralisation in mind. You can run it at home, in your business, your government agency or your local sports club. You decide who has access, and when the services of a big tech firm fall over, you can keep working.
But life isn’t about being alone on an island – it is about connecting people! Nextcloud Hub 9 is perfect for that, too. Our Federation features allows Nextcloud servers to talk to each other, bringing our tens of millions of users together from across the globe.
Of course, this release brings much more than federation. We help the public sector automate its processes so they can help you better; a chat mode in our AI Assistant; we introduce a brand new whiteboard to support your brainstorms and meeting notes; and there is a new more compact design with a fresh new background!
As always, we look forward to your feedback! Nextcloud is people, as much as technology, and if you want you can come say hi to us at the dozens of events we visit every year. Check out our event list and meet some fellow Nextclouders!
Greetings, Jos & the Nextcloud team
Decentralize your life!
Nextcloud Hub has grown into a leading open-source platform for collaboration, thanks to our tireless efforts to excel in privacy while bringing new cutting-edge features to the table with each release. Today, we launch Nextcloud Hub 9, a new iteration of our platform that pioneers automation tools, empowers teams, and drives digital transformation.
Sounds ambitious? We call it Tuesday!
A big design redo
To make Nextcloud more tidy and efficient while adding all the new features, we introduced countless design improvements around the entire platform and its applications.
Auto-magic with Nextcloud Flow
Our new Windmill-based app, part of Nextcloud Flow automation features, is an enterprise-focused process automation engine that is deeply integrated in Nextcloud Hub. It makes it possible to automate processes and flows: taking data from a form, parsing a PDF in an email, or processing a spreadsheet import, it kicks off actions like processing a payment through a third party provider, storing results in a table, notifying a user to approve the state and then generating and emailing a PDF.
A new creative medium
With the new Nextcloud Whiteboard, get creative together: even organize a drawing class in Nextcloud Talk! Now you have a limitless canvas to sketch, draw and plan collaboratively anywhere, even inside Nextcloud Talk calls.
Centralized? Let’s move on!
It is time to stop depending on big tech firms that control every aspect of our lives, and federation is the key! It means decentralising while letting separate systems interact with each other – exactly how email works. With Nextcloud Hub 9 we bring federation from files sharing and now to chats and video calls!
Your favorite cloud with hip new tools
We improved Nextcloud Hub with numerous new features throughout: Nextcloud Assistant’s Chat UI and support for hundreds of new languages for AI translations, a new wizard to request files in Nextcloud Files, AI-powered follow-up reminders and phishing detection in Nextcloud Mail, augmented reality calls with Nextcloud Talk, an easy way to fill in forms in Nextcloud Office, and so much more.
Collective innovation behind Nextcloud
Nextcloud is rooted in community, standing on the foundation of collective innovation. On behalf of the Nextcloud team, we want to thank everyone involved in coding, testing, sharing, providing feedback, supporting, and nurturing Nextcloud Hub, giving us a reason to celebrate this new release together.
Introducing Nextcloud Hub 9: a webinar
Join us live on September 26 to discover all the new features in Nextcloud Hub 9.
Can’t attend? You can still register and get the recording!
We believe that software should be accessible to everyone and everywhere, easy to use and always ready to work the way you expect it to. As new features and apps join Nextcloud Hub, we want to make sure we stay true to these principles.
If you have a feeling that something is different this time around, you are right! With more and more features being added every release, we want to prevent a sense of overwhelm in Nextcloud Hub’s interface. That’s why we gave our interface a make-over, letting the whole platform evolve while remaining highly accessible and user friendly.
More compact
First, we made everything more compact by downsizing various elements: input fields, buttons, links. This change lets us make use of the space more efficiently compared to our old interface. The new design is more cohesive and user-friendly, and we trust you’ll notice the difference once you experience it.
More tidy
Using rounded corners for various elements like buttons and fields, we achieved a more balanced aesthetic that maintains a relaxed visual experience without being overly stylized. It feels familiar across modern apps and devices, and it also allows for more efficient use of visual space.
And with a fresh new dynamic background
In Nextcloud Hub, you can also use any background you wish. The interface color scheme adjusts to match your background’s palette, giving your platform a cohesive and polished appearance — even on your mobile devices!
We are celebrating the new look of Nextcloud Hub with a new background style available in your Appearance settings. The new version supports dynamic backgrounds that adapt to your light or dark interface theme preferences. This background is the first to support themes in Nextcloud Hub 9, with more dynamic background designs coming soon!
Even more design improvements
Nextcloud Hub 9 brings multiple other feature- and app-specific improvements across various applications: Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Calendar, our mobile and desktop clients, and more. We are going to discuss them in the dedicated sections of this blog in more detail.
Now let’s move to new features, starting with one particular app that enables a whole new dimension of functionality in your Nextcloud Hub.
Welcome Nextcloud Flow
For most of us, it is easy to imagine learning, shopping, and banking from your mobile phone no matter where you are. For some, even accessing a government service entirely from the comfort of their home is a reality. For others — hopefully a future.
Nextcloud offers an extraordinary platform to work in, fully digitally. Our apps let you effortlessly handle, share and work on documents with Nextcloud Files and Nextcloud Office or track and process structured data with Nextcloud Tables. Nextcloud Talk and Nextcloud Groupware help with planning and communication, and dozens of other apps help with tasks like processing forms, tracking tasks and more.
All this is built on an open standards based platform. The Open Collaboration Services API supported by Nextcloud makes it easy to connect with other systems, sending or receiving data and building new apps.
The introduction of our new Windmill-based application brings digitalization to a new level. It allows automation of processes, taking data from within and outside of Nextcloud, tying in with its communication and planning tools and thus acting as a conductor leading an orchestra of processes!
How to Flow?
Nextcloud Flow combines features that help Nextcloud automate a variety of processes in your organisation. It consists of several components, from our Open Collaboration Services API (OCS API) and our structured data management application Nextcloud Tables to our existing workflow tool to our brand new business process automation application based on Windmill.
Windmill integration in Nextcloud Hub automates repetitive tasks by integrating your Nextcloud Hub apps and related assets into cohesive workflows. For instance, vacation requests, payment confirmations, or approvals for accessing and sharing data. The app provides a graphic interface to design, manage, and monitor workflows, making it easier to automate processes and improve efficiency.
The automation, build with the open source team at Windmill, uses everything that makes Nextcloud such a powerful platform: file handling, chat, notifications, structured data in Nextcloud Tables, Nextcloud Office and much more. Dozens of API’s have been developed, all as part of the standardized Open Collaboration Services API, making it easy to connect Nextcloud to other systems.
Understanding the flows
Windmill identifies events in Nextcloud Hub and triggers custom ‘flows’ created by you to retrieve and exchange data and perform sequences of actions across various apps and assets. Each flow is composed of ‘bricks,’ or individual actions that you program using a script.
The new workflow automation app is very flexible. It can run consecutive flows, or execute multiple flows in parallel, trigger an approval request for an employee, interact with external services like payment systems, and much more.
Digitalize processes in the public sector
Windmill integration in Nextcloud Hub has been designed to help the public sector comply with legislation like The Online Access Act (Onlinezugangsgesetz, OZG), a law in Germany that mandates citizens’ ability to interact with government services online, or with the EMBAG legislation in Switzerland that requires the public sector to use and develop open source solutions.
You can learn more about the challenges the public sector faces and how Windmill integration in Nextcloud Hub can help in our earlier blog post.
“The Online Access Act obliges the public sector to provide all administrative services digitally going forward. Open source software should be prioritised here. We are therefore delighted that with ‘Open Collaboration Services’, a 100% open source solution has been created for the first time with which specialised procedures can be implemented quickly and easily. Open source enables the simple sharing of specialised procedures on Open CoDE, which saves costs and strengthens digital sovereignty.”
Markus Richter
State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community and Federal Government Commissioner for Information Technology
Decentralization through federation
Federated features allow users of self-hosted platforms like Nextcloud Hub to communicate, share files, and collaborate across instances while storing their data locally. Federation is a foundational tool for digital sovereignty, enabling the creation of decentralized yet interconnected ecosystems.
Prior to the Nextcloud Hub 9 release, federated features supported in our platform included file sharing and collaboration, as well as federated chatting in Nextcloud Talk. Today, we are excited to announce that federated video calls also become available to our users!
Introducing federated calls
Users can join group chats on another Nextcloud server with their Federated Cloud ID. While in federated chat, they can use many of the core features like user mentions, markdown formatting, or polls.
With Nextcloud Hub 9, we add federated calls to our growing array of decentralized features. Now you can organize audio and video meetings among users of different Nextcloud Hubs — to meet with colleagues from a different government agency, or maybe a partner who is using Nextcloud too!
Joining a call on another server feels as if you are still in your own Nextcloud Hub – using your own account and a preferred interface, without a need for creating guest accounts or public links.
OCM, a foundation for federation features in Nextcloud
Federated Cloud Sharing API in Nexctloud has been invented by Nextcloud founders Frank Karlitschek and Bjoern Schießle. It is a collaboratively developed standard that is a part of Open Cloud Mesh (OCM), an initiative of the GÉANT Association, a European collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education.
Nextcloud Whiteboard
With Nextcloud Hub 9 , we are introducing a new collaborative app: Nextcloud Whiteboard. It gives you a limitless canvas and a range of tools to sketch, note, plan, or brainstorm together with your team.
Nextcloud Whiteboard works seamlessly with Nextcloud Talk. For example, you can brainstorm project structures and draw mind maps together in real-time while in a call. Or use it in a live workshop to illustrate concepts, create diagrams, and interactively engage participants.
Nextcloud Whiteboard is very intuitive and easy to use, ready to become your daily creative collaboration tool right away. It supports hand drawing with multiple colors and stroke types, shapes, images, arrows and other objects. Wide ranges of shapes like rectangles, circles, diamonds, arrows, lines and more, together with arrow-binding and labeled arrows, let you be flexible and creative without the need for an entire design suite.
Combine it with other media: draw on design mock-ups, building plans, schemes and other visuals by importing images of your own into the canvas.
Once ready, you can share your whiteboard and present it using the laser pointer feature, or invite users to collaborate with you, even from outside Nextcloud. Want to save or share your drawings as files? You can easily export them in PNG or SVG or copy to your clipboard.
Performance and scalability
We never stop working on Nextcloud Hub’s performance, realizing that it benefits not only end users and admins running our systems, but also the planet we all share. That’s why no matter how much more powerful we keep making Nextcloud, we allow it to use less resources with every update, considerably lowering its environmental impact. And of course, allowing it to run on more diverse hardware without loss in performance too.
Faster, more lightweight apps
One of the steps towards better performance in Hub 9 has been a switch to Vite, a tool to bundle the JavaScript. This reduced the size of our apps significantly, making some up to 5x smaller and thus load much faster fir everyone.
We also made numerous other improvements that make Nextcloud Hub more snappy overall:
Skip the time needed to set up a full filesystem for accessing public link-share DAV endpoints
Delay getting (sub)admin status until needed
Avoid queries during file share aggregation in Deck
More lazy app bootstrap
High Performance back-end
Since 2021, Nextcloud Files runs on the High Performance back-end written in Rust that reduced its network traffic consumption by up to 90%. It also made the app swifter for users, for example by enabling instant notifications.
With Nextcloud Hub 9, we introduced support for High Performance back-end to Nextcloud Text. It greatly reduces the server load and renders edits much faster with accelerated synchronization during collaborative sessions.
Server-side performance improvements
We also worked on the server-side performance, making improvements that reduce the load on your infrastructure:
Text: Reduce polling interval for read-only users
Nextcloud Assistant’s Context Chat: improved queuing, with smarter memory handling
Faster updates: avoiding duplicate repair steps, moving more repair/check steps out of update and to cron
Command to get information about database changes needed for an update
Database Sharding
In our last release, we introduced the foundation for Database Sharding, enabling the ability to split the Nextcloud database into several smaller databases and distribute the load across multiple servers. With Nextcloud Hub 9, we’ve continued to develop this feature, making it applicable for most use cases.
Read-After-Write behavior
Previously, Nextcloud required synchronous replication, limiting database clusters to a maximum of four nodes. Now, we added support for an unlimited number of Read nodes using asynchronous replication. Combined with database sharding, Nextcloud’s scalability has significantly advanced, allowing a single cluster to support up to 10 times more users.
AI and Nextcloud Assistant
Chat with Nextcloud Assistant, translate between hundreds of languages, work with Analytics and enjoy accelerated performance.
AI has become an integral part of Nextcloud Hub: Many core applications like Nextcloud Mail and Nextcloud Talk have their own built-in AI tools, while Nextcloud Assistant is getting more capable both feature-wise and in the back-end. At the same time, we integrate Ethical AI principles into our platform, enabling new AI features with a focus on privacy, transparency, and user control.
AI features available in Nextcloud Hub
Chat with Nextcloud Assistant
Nextcloud Assistant becomes even more convenient with a chat interface, where you can give prompts and ask questions in a dialog format. It will remember your conversations, making interactions more natural and smooth. Chat about your day, work on the next press release, or proofread your social media posts — locally on your server and without any data leaks!
Translate with Nextcloud Assistant
Translate app is now available directly from Nextcloud Assistant menu. Translation options are now almost limitless, as we added support for hundreds of languages that app can detect, read and translate to. The app can be deployed as an ExApp on a separate server, and now supports CPU and GPU, increasing performance and efficiency significantly.
Access Analytics with Nextcloud Assistant
Analytics, an application for processing and managing analytics data developed by our community, added supprt for Nextcloud Assistant’s Context Chat. This means that you can now ask it about the data from Analytics, and Context Chat will give you an answer if the app has relevant figures.
New API and a performance boost
We developed a new API that significantly improves the performance and scalability of the AI in Nextcloud, while also enabling the creation of new AI features. For example, it allows Assistant’s responses in the chat to be nearly instant, provided your back-end is sufficiently performant.
Nextcloud Files
Nextcloud Hub 9 makes file navigation easier, introduces the File Request feature, and keeps you up-to-date on your shares.
Request files
Need to collect files in a secure way from one or more users? Meet File Request, a feature that lets you request files with configurable security settings and tracking features.
To get started, click Create file request from the “+” menu of Nextcloud Files. Set a title and a description of your request and pick a drop folder. Set an expiration date and a password for your share, if you need an extra security layer.
When ready, you can simply share a link anywhere you prefer or add email addresses of recipients to share them right away via email. Every recipient will be asked to enter a name before dropping a file, to keep things on track.
Pasted a link in the wrong place? We’ve got you! To keep your requests under control, you can browse and manage active requests in the right sidebar and close them as needed.
We also added a push notification option to help you keep track of your files and folders. Now you can get notified if a user uploads a file you requested or downloads one you shared with them.
Filter files and folders
When you keep a lot of files in your system, navigating your library can become cumbersome, and time-consuming too. If you add just two more files daily, that’s already 60 more per month! To help you find what you need faster, we introduce file filters.
You can filter your files by file type, modification date and people. Fine-tune your browsing by combining different filters and filter types, and success is guaranteed.
Browse folders with tree view
Navigating complex folder paths is now easier with the folder tree view. The left sidebar in the new Nextcloud Files offers a classic tree-style display of your folders, making it simple to browse intricate project folders.
More improvements in Nextcloud Files
Ability to keep the folder structure when uploading
Group folders ACL: visual feedback when ACL update fails
Small Group folder improvements
Ability to enforce windows-compatible file names on the server
Server-side DAV pagination
Account management: sorting by last login
Possibility to upload a complete folder from a “+” menu
Delegate “Super-Admin” for user management
Allow to specify the token of a public share / share renaming
Improved grid view UI in Files
Nextcloud Office
PDF templates and forms, 3D transitions in slides, better interoperability and security, and more in the new version of Nextcloud Office.
PDF templates and form filling API
A new feature in Nextcloud Office for this release is the ability to handle document templates with forms. When a template document has a form, Nextcloud will provide a nice, easy-to-use interface for the user to fill in details. Then, the document will be created and opened, and the user can check if everything was added correctly and if they want to make any changes.
The form system is very powerful, yet easy to use. For example, you can fill in time-sheets, complete feedback forms, and do much more. And it’s not only limited to text: you can even create charts based on data from your documents. Organisations that use a lot of forms can use this to make the life of their team members a lot easier!
Developers can use the new document API in Nextcloud Office to create multiple documents from a central database or template, or collate information from multiple documents.
It is possible to streamline automated document creation by linking a database to a template using scripts. With templating, you can automate many interactions like reporting, proposal generation, client on boarding, or even production of marketing collateral.
Of course, the new Office API is available in the new Nextcloud Flow, which can automate a variety of things, from extracting data from documents to filling them in.
Presentations: 3D transitions and quicker loading
The presentation editor now supports fancy 3D transitions between slides that make your slideshows more dynamic and catchy. These use WebGL, putting the GPU in your laptop or desktop to work for buttery smooth animations.
You can access transitions via the transitions widget located in the editor’s sidebar. And the widget itself has been revamped too!
Presentations also became much faster all around, with swifter document opening and slide loading, and overall smoother scrolling and rendering of the elements.
Better security and interoperability
Rootless containers in Nextcloud Office now operate without requiring special privileges from the user, thanks to Linux Namespaces. This optional feature enhances security by isolating container processes more effectively.
Our Office suite in Nextcloud Hub 9 features improved security with several new features. The newly introduced Wholesome Encryption for ODF files offers enhanced performance, better tamper resistance, metadata hiding, and increased resistance to brute-forcing with the Argon2id key derivation function.
Nextcloud Office also became more interoperable. Work with metric-compatible Microsoft fonts has been improved together with compliance with ISO/IEC 29500 standard. New Excel-compatible functions were added like FILTER, SORT, and SORTBY, along with a smart justify feature.
Nextcloud Tables
Our no-code platform for data management gets new export and import features, optimized performance and more in Hub 9!
New column type: Users and groups
Assign a colleague or a team to a task in a table by adding their clickable name with a new column type Users and groups.
Export table schema
Export the table schema and import it as a new table to quickly create tables with a similar structure and populate them from scratch. This handy templating feature helps you quickly move tables from testing to production when you build environments based on Nextcloud Tables. And, of course, you can exchange these between organizations: Each city needs to handle things like a dog tax or registering a new citizen!
More in Nextcloud Office, Nextcloud Tables, and Nextcloud Collectives:
New functions in spreadsheet editor: FILTER, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE, RANDARRAY, XLOOKUP, XMATCH
Support of importing and exporting OOXML pivot tables (cell) format definitions
“Copy Cells”, or “Fill Series” options when autofilling by dragging from a corner of cells in Calc
Correct usage of ordinal suffixes 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on
Right click to insert and delete comments in Calc
Formula wizard interface improvements
PPTX files with heavy use of custom shapes now open faster
Pressing Enter in an empty list item ends the list
Transitions widget located in the sidebar has been revamped (it now uses iconView)
Admin warnings to display if you have mis-configurations
Firefox performance optimization and reduced garbage-collection giving snappier browser experience closer to that of Chrome / WebKit
Continued accessibility improvement and widget annotations
Nextcloud Talk
Improved moderation features, offline browsing on mobile, and Apple Vision Pro support in one of the most secure apps for online meetings.
Keep your chats healthy
Inside public conversations or during online events, it’s important to have a firm way to moderate the conversation, uphold your community guidelines and deal with potential spam. Nextcloud Talk features many moderation tools that help you maintain a safe and healthy environment like role management in chats, time tracking of who’s speaking, voice muting, and more.
Remove participants
With Nextcloud Hub 9 we introduce the ability to ban users who show disruptive behavior, publish spam links or abuse other participants.
Browse conversations even offline
Users of Nextcloud Talk on Android devices can now browse past conversation lists and chat messages offline, to quickly get back to important information even without needing an internet connection.
Don’t miss calls: add a second speaker!
Away from your laptop? Not an excuse to miss a call! Now you can choose a secondary device, like your Bluetooth headphones or a kitchen speaker to notify you of incoming calls. To activate the feature, head to notification settings and select a second output device.
Summon Smart Picker easily
You can now summon the Smart Picker in Nextcloud Talk via the attachment menu to add GIFs and videos, generate images with AI, link conversations and Deck cards, and even send map locations. For quick access to Smart Picker, you can type a “/” shortcut in the message box as usual.
Use Nextcloud Talk with Apple Vision Pro
When we say you can have your meetings anywhere, we mean it! Now you can join calls even in a virtual environment using our Nextcloud Talk app for your Apple Vision Pro headset
Nextcloud Groupware
Discover multiple security, usability, and navigation improvements across Nextcloud Groupware apps.
Nextcloud Mail
Smart follow-up reminders
The Nextcloud Assistant can already summarise email threads and generate meeting agendas from the your email content. With Nextcloud Hub 9, the Assistant can also check emails to see if the sender expects a reply: If it determines an email needs a follow-up, it will place it in a Follow up section to make sure you don’t forget!
Advanced search filters
Filter your inbox based on various conditions, such as subject line, sender, or tags with new email filtering mechanism. Unlike most other mail clients, Nextcloud Mail installs these filters as sieve scripts on the server, meaning the filters work regardless of which client you’re using. No need to set up the filters on your desktop and also your laptop, and then be annoyed they are not applied when you check mail on your phone!
Phishing detection
Some modern phishing emails are becoming exceedingly sophisticated, and therefore dangerous! And sometimes you’re moving quickly through your day, without an eye on potential dangers. In this case, Nextcloud keeps you alert about risky links and phishing or impersonation attempts by showing you a warning message.
End-to-end encryption with Mailvelope
Want to encrypt your mail using PGP? We’ve worked with the team behind Mailvelope to make sure the plugin works reliably with Nextcloud Mail, and also introduced a simplified domain registration feature for your convenience.
Nextcloud Calendar
More informative event window
The new sidebar in Nextcloud Calendar groups events, showing if they are your personal calendars, shared, which app they come from, and groups all hidden calendars together.
Availability display for rooms and resources
Before creating a new event, you can check the availability of Talk conversations and resources. Easier planning of all online meetings with less risk of anything going not-quite-as-planned.
Setting calendar as free or busy
Now you can decide if Nextcloud Hub shows your status as free or busy during events in your calendar. For example, you can set a calendar as transparent so it never changes your status to Busy.
Upcoming events in Nextcloud Talk conversations
Now every Nextcloud Talk conversation shows upcoming events happening within, reminding you of future meetings and making room availability more transparent.
Nextcloud Contacts
Delete or rename groups
Easily delete or rename groups with actions from the group menu, saving some of your precious time.
Set out-of-office replacements
When setting a Nextcloud-wide out-of-office status, you can assign another user or colleague to be your replacement during your absence. Their name will be visible in other apps like Nextcloud Talk, Nextcloud Mail, Nextcloud Calendar, and other locations throughout Nextcloud Hub.
Other improvements in Nextcloud Groupware:
Mail signatures and encryption with S/Mime
Mail: Add OCS API endpoint to send emails with automation
Mail: print out email
Mail: fix misplaced action menus
Mail: fire workflow events for incoming messages
Mail: API to read mails
Mail: simplified domain registration for Mailvelope
Mail: Fileviewer application
Allow enforcing strict email format
Contacts: migrate from Webpack to Vue
Contacts: migrate from Webpack to Vite for faster loading
Contacts: birthday and biography support for the system address book
Calendar: set start day of the week
Calendar: improve sidebar display of calendars
Calendar: auto refresh
CalDAV: invitations for shared calendars
CalDAV: fix unclear event update email for recurring events
DAV: hide CalDAV settings if no calendar-dependent apps are enabled
Calendar/CalDAV: delta sync for subscriptions and adaptive sync rates
CalDAV: send invitation emails via Nextcloud Mail
Even more security in Nextcloud Hub 9
Nextcloud Hub 9 lets you strengthen your security and administrative controls even further with several new fine-grained security tools and mechanics:
Ability to set up a PIN code for passwordless authentication to additionally secure your account should anybody obtain your security key.
Ability to restrict admin actions to internal IP addresses, disabling admin settings for users outside of trusted IP ranges.
More flexible admin rights delegation: option to enable user management rights for users without granting admin permissions
Ability to enable E2EE and SSE in Nextcloud Hub together
Enhanced metadata extraction capabilities including PDF files
Support for Azure Information Protection file tags
Nextcloud Clients
Refined design, optimized synchronization and more improvements in Nextcloud apps for desktop and mobile.
More native UI
We revised the design of Nextcloud clients for Windows and iOS to make them look more native in many ways, including transparency, buttons, spacing, and more.
New release channels for desktop app
New release channels are now available for the desktop client. Use the Daily channel to stay ahead with the latest features and improvements in the making, or Enterprise channel with updates for enterprise customers.
Two-way sync for Android
With two-way sync enabled for a folder, files added or updated on device automatically sync to your cloud, and the other way round. Currently, only internal folders created in Nextcloud are supported.
Other improvements in Nextcloud clients:
Improved handling of multi-monitor setups on macOS
Desktop client: Multiple Proxy Settings.
Login Flow v2 on Android and iOS.
Ability to enforce Windows-compatible file names on the server.
Improve notifications of file changes from notify_push server app.
Nextcloud ecosystem
New integrations join Nextcloud Hub, while our App Store receives a donation mechanism and gets more informative.
New in integrations
LLama 3
A third iteration of the popular open-source LLM with significant improvements in data quality and scalability.
XWiki
Open-source enterprise wiki and knowledge management platform. Integration? Partnership?
Enterprise support for new apps
Dovecot
Full-service email platform by OpenExchange
Stalwart Mail Server
Modern, high-performance email SMTP and MTA solution
Mailvelope
PGP for end-to-end email encryption.
All these open source technologies are available with our community edition, but we also partnered with the projects and companies behind them to offer an enterprise solution for our customers.
Nextcloud App Store
Donations
We want to give app creators an opportunity to spend more time on their apps for Nextcloud. So, we introduced donation links in our app store, allowing users to provide a tip to the developer of their favorite app. We support links to PayPal, Stripe and other solutions. Nextcloud keeps no commission — 100% of the funds goes to the developers. You can read more about donations in our documentation.
Enterprise apps
While donations are great, we believe the best approach to monetization for open source are enterprise subscription services when possible. So we offer app and integration developers the chance to work with us to offer an enterprise subscription from our app store – making it easy for prospective customers to request a quote.
Improved search and more
We also made a number of UI improvements, including a better search and the ability for app developers to signal needs about their app or notify about their update policy.
Take Nextcloud Hub 9 for a spin!
If you’re still with us, it means we’ve successfully brought you to the most important part of this journey.
Nextcloud is not a craft of marketing, it is a craft of engineering with true passion for privacy, transparency and humanity. That’s why we keep bringing the results of our work to you for free. Click below and start using the latest and greatest of Nextcloud Hub today!
You can download Nextcloud Hub 9 from our installation page. Among available options, you can use a zip file or the all-in-one image for fresh installation.
Over the coming weeks, we will make it available to our home users via updater using the usual staged roll-out process. You can switch to the Beta channel temporarily if you want to try the new Hub right away. Don’t forget to switch back to stable after you’ve updated to Nextcloud Hub 9!
Note: Nextcloud caches the results coming from our updater server, so it can take some time for the new version to show up and you likely have to refresh the page, wait a bit, then try again.
How to update: AIO users
For new Nextcloud All-in-One (AIO) users, you can install Hub 9 directly by checking the “Install Nextcloud 30” box.
We have a dedicated setup guide for AIO users. Follow the guidelines to easily set up Hub 9.
The Nextcloud Enterprise version of Hub 9 will become available soon, once we successfully run the additional testing and complete certification.
AI technology has become too useful and accessible to ignore, so more and more users make the choice to sacrifice tomorrow’s privacy for the sake of an excellent result today.
At Nextcloud, we believe that everybody deserves privacy. We released the first open-source AI assistant that is hosted where you want it to be. It can get a multitude of tasks done inside your content collaboration platform without compromising your data: in content writing, mail communication, team chats, and more.
Introducing Nextcloud AI Assistant
Nextcloud AI Assistant is a capable and versatile tool that enhances your work throughout Nextcloud Hub to keep writing, communication, and other productivity tasks simple and low effort.
Unlike other AI-powered content collaboration tools, Nextcloud doesn’t share your data with a third party technology provider to train the core AI model. This means that all data you work with, including documents, emails, chats and more, stays yours.
How do we accomplish that?
We build the AI Assistant using a flexible, solution-independent approach which gives you a choice between multiple large language models (LLM) and services. It can be fully hosted within your instance, processing all requests in-house, or powered by an external service. This enables unmatched capabilities of language processing across various use scenarios with control of what is running behind your instruments and how. And importantly, you can have a 100% open-source assistant.
Nextcloud AI Assistant features are available in the main Nextcloud Hub navigation to help you with quick text tasks, and in several apps including Text, Mail, and soon Talk, for app-specific actions.
If you want to read about other AI tools available in Nextcloud, we welcome you to read the AI features overview or visit our documentation portal.
Quick access from your navigation bar
Whatever you are working on, Nextcloud AI Assistant is only one click away. Should you need any help with a small task like generating a headline, paraphrasing a text, or translating a sentence, just click on a icon on the top right corner of the main navigation and give the Assistant its input.
More and more tools are tools are supported with every new version of Nextcloud Hub. Make sure to check out the Nextcloud Hub 9 release blog to find the latest features!
Chat with Nextcloud Assistant
Nextcloud Assistant becomes even more convenient with a chat interface, where you can give prompts and ask questions in a dialog format. It will remember your conversations, making interactions more natural and smooth. Chat about your day, work on the next press release, or proofread your social media posts — locally on your server and without any data leaks!
Ask it about your own assets
You can ask Nextcloud Assistant aout your own data with Context Chat. To answer questions about your documents and assets, Nextcloud Assistant gets access to data from different apps, for example Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Collectives and even the Analytics app. You can manually define the scope and even limit it to a specific folder or file for more precision.
Here you can enter your prompt.
You can optionally choose what documents should be used
And here are the results!`
Texts written your way
Context Write is another feature of Nextcloud Assistant powered by context awareness. It can derive context from existing files to convey their unique tone, wording, and even structure to create new texts with the data you provide. Tell Nextcloud Assistant about your working experience and give it a nice CV file, and it will create a custom CV for you. Share meeting notes of a discussion, or the transcript generated from a video call in Talk, as well as a report that looks like the one you would like to create. The Assistant goes to work and creates a report similar to your reference – now review it, and done!
Translate with AI
AI translation is available directly from Nextcloud Assistant menu. Translation options are now almost limitless, as we added support for hundreds of languages that app can detect, read and translate to.
Language assistance in Nextcloud Text
With help of the AI Assistant, Text has you covered when it comes to perfecting your writing and text composition. The tool is available right in the text, freeing you from distractions and extra tab journeys.
Once you select a piece of text to get help with, summon the Assistant menu by clicking the icon next to the selected paragraph. You can get a summary of your text, generate an accurate headline, reformulate it, or translate it into another language. If you are happy with the result, insert it in your text in a simple click.
Summaries, replies and reminders in Nextcloud Mail
The Nextcloud Assistant summarizes bulky email threads for you, so you save a hefty amount of time when searching back in your conversations in Mail. All given tasks, suggestions, and questions are displayed in a clear and concise way, so you get an accurate idea of the whole history of communication.
Nextcloud Assistant also generates quick reply suggestions to your incoming emails based on the email texts, letting you quickly respond to them.
Nextcloud Assistant can also check emails to see if the sender expects a reply: If it determines an email needs a follow-up, it will place it in a Follow up section to make sure you don’t forget!
Need help with the answers? Summon the Assistant from the top toolbar to write a response according to your parameters or improve your writing.
Automatic event creation in Nextcloud Calendar
You can create Calendar events from your emails right in the Nextcloud Mail app. Nextcloud Assistant will automatically generate event titles and descriptions, and even the event agenda. No more going back and forth to set up meetings and reminders!
Smart communication in Talk
Nextcloud Assistant is integrated seamlessly in Nextcloud Talk. We designed it to augment your work conversations and help your team in brainstorming, planning, and clearly expressing ideas.
First and foremost, the Assistant will make sure your discussions flow freely with the ability to translate messages, write texts, and generate media as you chat. Some of those features are available through Smart Picker (type “/” and see the magic!).
However, we don’t plan to stop there and we want the Assistant to become a real participant in the conversation. We are gifting the bot the ability to communicate with you in a most human way possible by answering your questions and providing helpful suggestions for the issues on your agenda. For example, you can ask the Assistant to outline an event preparation plan or to draft a marketing campaign for you using real inputs from your very tasks.
Processing data completely on your server
In everything we do, Nextcloud commits to transparency and trust. Working hard to combine comfort with responsible handling of your data, we made all core AI apps in Hub, including the Nextcloud AI Assistant, fully open-source and running locally on your server.
Your data belongs to you, and not a single bit of information is shared with a third party provider to improve performance, study user behavior, or train an AI model.
You may still want to use popular services like ChatGPT and Dall-E, and we are giving you the freedom to do so in Nextcloud. Before making your decision, you can refer to the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating to find out more about how available AI apps in Nextcloud handle your data and estimate the risks related to code availability, deployment options, and access to training data.
Sovereign AI-as-a-Service
We have been working closely with several major European hosting companies including IONOS, OVHcloud and plusserver to integrate their upcoming AI-as-a-Service solutions. This will make them available to Nextcloud customers and users who wish to take advantage of the advanced AI functionalities in Nextcloud Hub but don’t wish to host AI services themselves.
The future: dedicated AI for public sector and more
AI is a quickly developing field. One technology that will be important going forward are text generation models optimized for specific tasks. One example is the public sector where employees are working with large amounts of complicated forms.
Together with the German state of Schleswig-Holstein Nextcloud is working to build a digitally sovereign AI model. Its aim is to accelerate the bureaucratic processes in the public sector with ethical AI-powered content collaboration tools.
Minister of Digitization of Schleswig-Holstein and Nextcloud CEO shake hands
The project focuses on crafting a large language model tailored to the specific needs of the offices dealing with state affairs, namely creation of highly standardized texts using accepted language style and wording, optimized search of process-specific information, and other tasks. Anonymized training data provided by the state will be used in its training.
The model in-the-making will be released as Open Source to encourage the adaptation of sovereign, ethical AI within the digitalization strategies of the governments. Context Chat feature, for example, is the first result of our collaboration.
There will be other fine-tuned AI models for Nextcloud appearing over the coming months and years, helping employees in all kinds of specializations with their tasks.
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