Hi everyone!
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 Windmill 🪄
Our new Windmill-based app 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, and then kicking 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 hit 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!
Design that gives you more 📐✨
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 b
