“If we move into this information age, and information is the new gold or the new currency, how do we distribute the rights to that information in a fair and balanced way? Different cultures and different democracies will have different answers to that.. there can be parts that are open source that allows you to move your data out into another system, which is one of your rights as an individual – your right to privacy.”
– Max Schrems

Max became known for campaigns against Facebook for its privacy violations, including violations of European privacy laws and the alleged transfer of personal data to the US National Security Agency (NSA). He is most well known for his lawsuits on the Safe Harbor agreement (Schrems I) and the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield (Schrems II).

Today he is the Founder & Honorary Chair of NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights.

The post Nextcloud Podcast: Privacy and Surveillance Law with Max Schrems appeared first on Nextcloud.

“If we move into this information age, and information is the new gold or the new currency, how do we distribute the rights to that information in a fair and balanced way? Different cultures and different democracies will have different answers to that.. there can be parts that are open source that allows you to move your data out into another system, which is one of your rights as an individual – your right to privacy.”
– Max Schrems

Max became known for campaigns against Facebook for its privacy violations, including violations of European privacy laws and the alleged transfer of personal data to the US National Security Agency (NSA). He is most well known for his lawsuits on the Safe Harbor agreement (Schrems I) and the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield (Schrems II).

Today he is the Founder & Honorary Chair of NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights.

Links

• Max Schrems | schre.ms
• NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights
• Max Schrems: The EU-US Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework | Nextcloud Conference 2023 – YouTube
• Nextcloud Conference 2023
• Keynotes and Panel Sessions | Nextcloud Conference 2023 – YouTube
• Lightning Talks | Nextcloud Conference 2023 – YouTube
• Nextcloud Conference 2023 – YouTube
• MotionLab.Berlin | Hardtech Innovation Hub
• Jupiter Broadcasting
• LINUX Unplugged | Jupiter Broadcasting
• Self-Hosted | Jupiter Broadcasting

The post Privacy and Surveillance Law with Max Schrems appeared first on Nextcloud.

Read on to find out how the Archdiocese of Cologne created their own private cloud solution with Nextcloud.

About the Archdiocese of Cologne

The Archdiocese of Cologne, or Erzbistum Köln in German, is the largest Catholic diocese in all of Germany. Home to 1.8 million Catholics, the institution has been around for over 1,700 years and continues to bring people together and preach the Catholic faith.

The Nextcloud solution

The team at the Archdiocese of Cologne needed a solution that enabled their employees and volunteers to be able to communicate and collaborate effectively. With Nextcloud, this and all the requirements of their IT department were met:

• Simple, easy to use and intuitive solution
• Coverage for thousands of users spread over 6,100 square kilometers
• Availability of web-based Office
• Improvement of communication and cooperation of employees and volunteers
• Integrations with existing use of BBB (Big Blue Button) and Outlook
• Strict data protection compliance with GDPR

A diocese-wide collaboration platform

With the help of Nextcloud and their IT provider, an on-premises collaboration platform for all diocese members was implemented. Coined “communis,” employees and volunteers can now use Nextcloud Files, Talk, Office and more.

Read the full case study

In the case study, learn more about the Archdiocese’s implementation of Nextcloud and its results.

Download now

The post Archdiocese of Cologne: More than 4,400 users collaborate on Nextcloud Hub appeared first on Nextcloud.

Earlier today, our founder Frank Karlitschek accepted the honorary SFS Award for ongoing contribution to the mission of Free Software. The award is a highlight of the 20^th annual SFSCON dedicated to promotion and implementation of FOSS in Europe and beyond. Image source: NOI Techpark

A big day for the Nextcloud community

European SFS Award is a big part of the South Tyrol Free Software Conference (SFSCON), an event centered around promotion and implementation of the Free Software culture.

Each year, the award is presented to an individual who, according to the SFS community, has made a meaningful impact in advancing the principles and adoption of free software in their respective communities and in the broader software industry.

In the 2023 edition, Frank Karlitschek earns the honor, dedicating the award to everyone participating in the Nextcloud project.

I accept this award in the name of Nextcloud, our dynamic and dedicated community, and a hardworking team of bright individuals who made it happen. Today, we all win!

Frank Karlitschek

Founder and CEO of Nextcloud

In previous years, the European SFS Award has been given to the pioneers of Free Software representing a wide array of backgrounds including software engineering and research, open source project coordination, and free software advocacy. To the Nextcloud community, this is a milestone that recognizes our collective impact on the FOSS industry and the European IT as a whole.

About SFSCON

SFSCON is one of Europe’s most established annual events focused on Free Software that has a history dating back to 2004. The event’s mission is the promotion of FOSS in digital infrastructures, as a means of creating the environment for better innovation and healthy competition. The event takes place in person in South Tirol, Italy.

The conference brings together everyone involved: education and research organizations, software developers, Free Software foundations, and decision makers of all levels. Its program covers dedicated tracks for development, AI, cybersecurity, community activities, lawmaking, and more.

At SFSCON 2023, Frank takes the spotlight among the Main Track talks, presenting “What the AI revolution means for Open Source, Open Tech and Open Societies” and becoming a part of the Software Freedom” roundtable. Björn Schließle, computer scientist and Nextcloud’s co-founder, contributes to the Artificial Intelligence Track under the “Nextcloud – did you know?” title.

The post Nextcloud founder earns European Free Software Award appeared first on Nextcloud.

Governments, agencies and public services have the immense responsibility to protect citizen’s data. With the tremendous amount of choices for online collaboration tools hosted by dozens of different vendors, it is hard to keep an overview of where that data is. At the same time, strict policies forbidding employees from using random third-party platforms limits their productivity and it is hard to ensure the rules are followed.

The best solution is of course to offer a single collaboration platform that is easy to use, offers all functionality users need AND that can be trusted with sensitive data. But can you trust a third party vendor with such power? There are legal but also public image consequences of a choice of vendor.

What if you didn’t have to rely on any third party at all and you could keep data under your own control?

Amid rising concerns about digital sovereignty, many governments and public services are discovering the benefits of an open-source, on-premises collaboration platform in Nextcloud. Let’s dig into why governments around the world are choosing the Nextcloud solution.

Host your data at home

Foreign cloud providers like Microsoft and Google have obtained customers across the globe, however for those outside of the USA, there are legal and practical consequences.

One of those is being subject to the pressure of a foreign government.The U.S. has laws in place that force tech companies to release their data to US intelligence agencies as well as businesses or government agencies when a court mandates it. This can even happen under a gag order, so the entity which has its data handed over will not know about it – or only long after it happened. In short, foreign data is at risk and could be compromised at anytime whenever it is being held by US based companies. Note the wording – this extends beyond US borders! Even data in an European data center is subject to the US CLOUD Act, signed by US president Donald Trump. Despite international efforts to remedy the situation, even the EU-US Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy framework does not eradicate the risk involved.

It is far safer to house your data within trusted data servers in your country. With Nextcloud, governments and public services can be in control over their data and do not not have to worry about foreign regulations or changing laws. Out of all our government customers, hosting data in one’s own country is the highest priority that can be achieved by deploying Nextcloud.

For instance, the City of Geneva in Switzerland placed high importance on a cloud solution that is secure and compliant with data privacy law. With Nextcloud, these requirements were all possible and to prove it, even an extensive audit was executed to make sure our solution was the best fit.

Avoid vendor lock-in

A serious risk with SaaS vendors is around vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in, often designed into SaaS products, is a situation where a customer can not move away from a vendor as the switching costs would be very high. This is not just in terms of money – often, moving away means losing (meta) data, or incurring a significant period where there will be no service. Taking data out of a cloud service, for example, can take a long time, and shut down operations. Here are several identifiable risks:

1. If sanctions force the vendor to shut down their product or service, they go bankrupt, or the company is sold, the customer is stuck. If they want to update their policies that go against your protocols, they have the power to do so without informing you in advance. This kind of unreliability cannot be tolerated by government and public sector entities.
2. If the vendor raises prices, you’re stuck paying the new price.

1. If your company relies on a critical product, feature or integration provided by the vendor and they decide to discontinue it, you’re completely out of luck and will be left to find a new solution.

What’s the perfect antidote against the risks of vendor lock-in? The answer is open source. When you run open source software like Nextcloud yourself or at a local hosting provider, nobody has the power to shut down your service or lock you out of your data. Even if, for whatever reason, Nextcloud would no longer be a reliable vendor, availability of the source code and our policies on open standards would allow customers to migrate to other solutions while they keep their service running for the time inbetween.

Protect citizens data

With a growing digitization, the challenge of privacy and security becomes ever bigger. Governments can not be seen to leak data of citizens. It is paramount that government institutions have a solution in place that gives them and their citizen’s the certainty that the way they store and work with data is secure.

With Nextcloud Files, government entities can rely on secure document exchange internally and with other organizations. Security features like File Drop, group folders with advanced permissions and persistent versioning create a safe environment to work.

Boost digitization

With so many productivity tools out on the market, it’s easy to pick a few that you think are best for their main use: The fastest internal chat, the sleekest mail system and the most versatile file storage. However, constantly switching between different applications can produce a toggle tax or the cognitively taxing switch from one task to another. It also increases your reliance on multiple platforms and the companies that back them.

With a single platform like Nextcloud, all your applications from file storage to email are in one place and backed by you.

Using a single platform enables stronger productivity, collaboration and security as well as significantly lowers costs and maintenance work.

What Nextcloud offers

Nextcloud offers a modern, easy to use Content Collaboration Platform accessible through mobile, desktop, and web interfaces. Teams collaborate seamlessly in real-time documents, chat, and engage in video calls, access their email or plan meetings in calendars. As a pure software vendor, Nextcloud does not force customers to host in its data centers but works with a variety of leading partners to provide SaaS or on-premises solutions.

• Don’t hand your data to a third party
• Fully auditable code
• No vendor lock-in
• Industry leading security features
• Integrated collaboration environment

Pave your own path towards digital sovereignty

It’s never too late to start building your path towards full digital sovereignty. With Nextcloud, it can be accomplished and once you reclaim your data, you’ll never look back.

The post Digital Sovereignty for Governments with Nextcloud Enterprise appeared first on Nextcloud.

2020 brought us working from home and zooms, followed by workations and the event industry going hybrid. While things are not as extreme anymore, business did change. Today, maintaining a comfortable and productive remote work experience via business collaboration software is as important as having functioning elevators in the office tower.

Nextcloud is a business collaboration powerhouse that provides consumer-grade comfort. Our solutions, after all, are built by a distributed community members and employees, continuously tested and perfected by the very same users.

It is great to see a product that speaks for itself and people ask for it. Often products don’t get accepted because users don’t need it or it doesn’t work for them. With Nextcloud you see a hunger for more.

Jeroen Agten

Coordinator ICT at ZGTRead case study

Whether intended for a hybrid or a remote-first model, Nextcloud incorporates an agile online collaboration and sharing environment for business integrated with native communication tools and multitude of satellite apps working together as a whole.

Tackling the challenges of the paperless office

Going paperless is awesome. With all documentation and communication being digital, business processes run smoother and faster, while environmental impact and cost are minimized.

With less funds reserved to office supplies, storage, mailing, document preservation and recreation, and labor costs, a company of 100 employees can save up to $660,000 annually. That gives paperless office a considerable ROI.

However, with the benefits that online document sharing and co-editing offers come challenges that require the right solutions.

Go paperless with Nextcloud

A scalable collaborative platform that requires very little to set up and supercharge your teamwork.

Browse features

Changing rules: ensuring compliance today and tomorrow

At Nextcloud, we take security very seriously, ensuring full compliance with provisions of the important regional and industrial regulations including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, FERPA, and COPPA.

We fight for independence from global cloud providers that prey on your data and market loud promises behind the black box of proprietary code. With secure on-premises deployment, your data stays local and out of sight of the big tech. This is what we call trust by design, not threatened by the dynamic regulation landscape.

On top of that, open source code and consistent update cycle mean that every minor issue is spotted and patched before you blink — and it’s not only backed by our own good faith, but by a vast community of developers and enthusiasts who make our solutions better every day.

Compliance in Nextcloud

Global scale, local data

Scaling an on-premise solution across a network of independent data locations is no easy task. Storage accommodation, load balancing, and database licensing exponentially increase the price you pay for large a private cloud.

Nextcloud Global Scale is designed to serve millions of users within a network where lower maintenance costs meet full local control over data:

• Federated sharing with unlimited scalability
• Cost reduction via deployment on commodity hardware and software
• Locality and low latency via distribution between data centers
• Minimum security risks, maximum regional regulation compliance

Reclaim your data with Nextcloud Enterprise

Nextcloud Enterprise is a full-stack collaboration platform control over your data first. Built by users, for users, it delivers clean, effortless experience for administration and teams alike.

With Nextcloud Enterprise, you you get:

• Pioneering file sharing, office, communication and groupware
• Boundless customization and growing selection of integration-ready apps including Microsoft tools
• Enterprise-grade security features and faster critical bug fixes
• Open source code and well-documented open API
• Short learning curve with dedicated professional support

Nextcloud in action

Stadtsparkasse Munich Switches to Local Cloud

Nextcloud partner HNK has provided this Munich city bank with a secure, compliant collaboration platform.

Download

German Radio and TV

IVZ, Germany’s public radio and television deploys Nextcloud with ONLYOFFICE for efficient file exchange and online content collaboration.

Download

ZGT Dutch hospital deploys Nextcloud

Dutch hospital ZGT achieves digital sovereignty with Nextcloud.

Download

The post Nextcloud for enterprises: privacy, scalability, and effortless business collaboration appeared first on Nextcloud.

Dependency on proprietary hyperscalers like Amazon will strangle local technology, end up controlling and rerouting public spending, and make the state and society vulnerable to blackmail.

Sovereignty is the absence of strong dependencies on third parties. The Sovereign Cloud from AWS is a misnomer here.

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud, in his comment to FAZ.net.

Read full article (in German)

A viable strategy to build a naturally sovereign European cloud already exists and should be put into action. It is entirely possible to build local, open-source ecosystems offering government and citizens direct control over data access and security, unmoderated by foreign big tech monopolists.

Issues with growing reliance on Amazon services

Due to Amazon’s monopoly-like role in the global cloud market, the employment of AWS cloud locks the government administrations and the European public sector in general within an externally controlled proprietary framework:

• When administrations commit to AWS cloud and the technology behind them, controlled exclusively by Amazon, it would limit the interoperability with the broader ecosystem and consequently lead to further expansion of the technological monopoly.
• A massive technological dependency would also mean continuous flow of substantial financial resources to Amazon and providers developing exclusively on its standards, making investments in European cloud offerings unattractive and permanently entrenching the monopoly positions.
• As the code isn’t available for public review, there is no guarantee against back doors present in the code or introduced anew via software updates and fixes.
• The withholding of security patches, late application of security improvements for known issues (or absence of such) or sharing information about known, unfixed problems with a third party could compromise the security of the platform. Recent incidents around the Pegasus spyware have shown the risks of unknown and know open security issues and how these can be and are abused at industrial scale by state and non-state actors.
• With Amazon being the single provider behind the ecosystem, the unilateral termination of the contractual relationships could jeopardize the provision of public services.

As a final result, the state actors critically dependent on Amazon products would be forced to:

• Pay almost any price called for.
• In the future, forego concessions originally made with regard to data security and independence from U.S. authorities.
• To accept non-open, proprietary standards set by Amazon, to which other (EU) states and large parts of the economy might have to realign themselves.

Strategic use of open source software as an alternative

The key alternative to the use of Amazon-controlled cloud infrastructure in public administration is the strategic use of open source software. This includes the adoption and further development of open source solutions that already exist and have been tried and tested by millions of users across all sectors of economy and government.

Open source technologies have become so successful because they were able to adapt very quickly to new requirements by a huge developer community. Only in this way could the high pace of innovation of digitization be realized at all. In fact, the large, market-dominating cloud providers such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, have relied almost exclusively on open source software, adapting them to their needs and building their own proprietary offerings on it.

Benefits open source brings, like the excellent usability and functionality, ability to control data access and security provisions, interoperability and complete customization freedom can thus meet the key needs that exist in administrations and industry worldwide.

Open source software is continuously developed by international communities. These usually consist of employees of companies and other organizations that use this software industrially. Conceptually, the state can build up sufficient competence in institutions such as the planned Center for Digital Sovereignty to participate in corresponding communities so that it can competently manage corresponding service providers.

According to studies, investments in the development of OSS bring an impressive 4x return on investment for the European GDP. With targeted investments, a successful strategy to create an equal-opportunity supplier market for European IT and digital ecosystems and platforms is fully conceivable.

How to achieve the real digital sovereignty for the European public sector

As a part of a strategy against escalating dependence of public administration and the industry on the proprietary, foreign cloud technology, the government should implement the following:

• Deploy only fully open source-based offerings for implementing and handling key tasks of a sovereign state and enforce the same for in the private sector for mission-critical industrial applications.
• Invest in open source cloud application and infrastructure. These alternatives to the hyperscaler tech have a great potential to leapfrog even the hyperscalers in innovation. They should become the basis of a sustainable European digital economy.
• The open source ecosystem must be initially strengthened with targeted government mandates in order to activate private-sector investments and the involvement of the local providers. Every investment in open source is immediately available to the general public and thus also directly benefits the economy and civil society.
• Cooperation with Amazon (or any proprietary offering) to build a “sovereign” cloud runs counter to these goals. Unilateral dependency threatens to make the state and society highly susceptible to malicious foreign actors, and limit strategic autonomy.
• Do not wait. Digital dependency already starts with the IT infrastructure. A later change of the cloud platform entails high costs and efforts that are insurmountable for many organizations. The state must set the course for a sovereign and open cloud today.

Summary

It is positive to see the American Big Tech firms realizing they have to take the Digital Sovereignty of Europe more serious, and to see them look for ways around the US CLOUD ACT. However, It is clear that a EU data center does not block foreign entities from accessing EU citizen data, and neither do company policies.

The effectiveness of Amazon’s approach, which to us just seems a slight variation on earlier, unsuccessful attempts, will end up having to be tested in US courts — likely in secrecy under a gag order, so we won’t even know if it made a difference. Even if it does work, it does little to resolve the dependency problem which is at the core of the Digital Sovereignty challenge.

As we now see with various sanctions, foreign companies can be forced to stop services or sales to Europe, limiting the EU’s ability to make its own, sovereign decisions. A real Digitally Sovereign solution would need a fully open source based platform which is fundamentally not under control of a foreign state. Without the ability for European countries to run, maintain and improve a platform, independence just can’t be guaranteed.

We outlined the direction governments should take, and look forward to constructive input and a chance to contribute to the implementation of a strong, European Digital Economy.

The post Why the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is an obstacle to reaching true digital sovereignty appeared first on Nextcloud.

We’ve made available new minor releases for Hub 3, 4 and 6. As always, minor releases include stability and security improvements that are designed to be a safe and quick upgrade.

You can find the full changelog of fixes and improvements for these releases on our website. Some highlights include some LDAP and other user management improvements, minor improvements in Text, some UI fixes and many other small bug fixes.

Note: With 25.0.13 we are at the end of the road for Nextcloud Hub 3. Upgrade to Nextcloud Enterprise to continue to get security and stability updates or move to Nextcloud Hub 4 or Hub 6. Don’t forget that running web-facing software without regular updates is risky. If no upgrade to 26 was offered to you yet, please check your PHP version! Nextcloud 25 was the last release still supporting PHP 7.4 (which also is unsupported for roughly a year now), so upgrading to PHP 8.x is necessary. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed

Note²: PHP 7.x is no longer officially supported by the PHP community. Nextcloud has supported PHP 8.0 and newer versions for some time now, and we strongly recommend you move to a newer version of PHP. Version 8.0 is already out of active support (!) and has only a few months of security updates left. Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x) deprecates PHP 7.4 but still works with it. We recommend you use PHP 8.1 or newer. Hub 4 and newer support PHP 8.2.

Desktop Client 3.10.1

In other news, the Desktop Client team pushed out a minor release, 3.10.1, fixing a small number of bugs and minor issues. You can find the full changelog here. Improvements include a fix for chunked upload.

WARNING: This version is known to crash on legacy (no longer maintained) releases of macOS. We have raised the requirements at install to macOS 12+. In the future we may be able to lower the requirement back to 11+, however we of course strongly recommend against running unsupported (and thus likely insecure) versions of Mac OS or any other software.

We had some delays in the release due to build changes and another minor release might already come relatively soon.

Ready to move to Nextcloud Hub 6?

Nextcloud Hub 6 was released 2 weeks ago and we recommend that you check it out to see if you can benefit from its latest features. A quick summary:

100% local, private AI assistant that can summarize your mail threads and help you write, translate, dictate and more
Show speaking time, 1 hour call warning for a healthy meeting culture
File, chat & mail reminders so you don’t always have to JUMP immediately on what’s new
Bots in Talk to help you summarize meetings and bring content from other tools in Talk
New file selector to make navigating your files easier, and updated share flow to simplify sharing
NEW: developers can now write apps in ANY language, not just PHP!
Much, much more!

Check out the full release announcement here.

Note that the AI features are, of course, optional – and updating is easy as Hub 6 is built on the same foundation as Hub 5, not requiring any heavy migrations.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are generally painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as a system administrator.

The post Last update for Hub 3, plus Hub 4, 6 and desktop client appeared first on Nextcloud.

To keep up with today’s rising quality standards and enjoy the new level of working comfort, you may want to introduce a few AI tools in your software deck. Even more so, when your content collaboration platform seamlessly integrates those like Nextcloud does.

AI-powered content collaboration tools

In modern workspaces, a very fast cycle of implementing new generation productivity and collaboration instruments is evident. AI software is not an exception here. Artificial intelligence has proved to be useful in groupware and content creation apps, integrating seamlessly into the office IT. This diversity of apps allows teams to choose the tools that suits their workflow best, promoting efficiency and creativity.

One of the key benefits of integrating AI into content collaboration platforms is the significant boost in productivity and quality. AI can automate repetitive tasks, such as data analysis and formatting. This enables team members to focus on more creative and strategic aspects of their work. Moreover, with an ability to train the generative AI models on selective datasets, the outcome is technically configurable. Adding a custom touch, you can make the final content adhere to the desired industry standards and best practices.

Ethical AI concerns

However, ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI, and especially the publicly available cloud tools, are valid. One of the primary issues is the potential for bias and misinformation. AI may inadvertently generate content that perpetuates stereotypes or inaccuracies. Secondly, models provided by proprietary vendors often receive the training data in real time. It comes from the very users of the software, putting your data and your privacy commitments at risk.

And the law might not be there to protect you, at least not yet. AI companies keep successfully appealing international privacy charges to continue capitalizing on your pictures in someone’s interest.

Can AI be used ethically? The solution to the efficient and safe use of the AI in creative work is to promote conscious choice of AI-powered content collaboration tools. Equally important is to encourage continuous training and upskilling of the users.

At Nextcloud, we believe that ethical AI should:

• Be open source when it comes to the code behind the solution and the training routine.
• Be available as a self-hosted AI model within user’s infrastructure to provide ultimate control over the data.
• Grant open access to the training sets to ensure ethical and legal compliance.

Let’s discover eight AI-powered instruments that you can start using today and learn how to make informed decisions with principles of AI ethics in mind.

AI text generation

Let’s start with the simplest and the most widely applicable use for generative AI — text generation. Text tools see a booming success in creative writing since it takes a very little effort to achieve high quality results. And it doesn’t need a detailed input: even a very short prompt will bring you a rich, informative text based on massive knowledge database it has been trained on. Accessed from a browser tab or embedded in a text editor, text generation AI software is a handy addition to your routine.

However, developers of artificial intelligence models, including text generation tools, achieve the impressive delivery through exhaustive training. Very often they train the language models using your own input data. This makes online AI tools a questionable choice when working with sensitive business information.

At Nextcloud, we try to challenge this culprit. We give you freedom to choose what model to use and how your AI-powered content collaboration tools will handle your data.

Nextcloud Assistant is a text generation tool integrated in the Text app and the navigation bar that can write, summarize, and create headlines for any texts. You can host it on-premises, making sure your data doesn’t leak out to any third party. How? Read the Nextcloud AI guide to learn more about all AI apps you can use to power Nextcloud Hub.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

AI Image generation

Image generation, though less applicable in wide use scenarios, gains popularity due to rapid advancement of GANs (Generative Adversary Networks). AI delivers contextually accurate visuals that look appealing and mostly natural. With the right prompt, it can easily troubleshoot problematic image search. Image generation with apps like Dall-E and Replicate can become a staple in creating artworks for articles, social media, web pages, and even ads.

In comparison to text generation, casually creating an image using artificial intelligence requires more skill. In practice, a detailed prompt with clear structure promises a much better result. Plus, in many cases, it takes lengthy trial and error practice before you receive the anticipated outcome. That, and still a not-so-perfect state of training make professionals reluctant to use it for more serious purposes like big budget advertising, for example.

However, the technology is already here, and everybody can use it to draft imagery for web content, illustrate ideas with sketches, and create simple visuals for social media posts. In Nextcloud, you can generate images in Talk chats and text documents using the Smart Picker feature. Choose one of several available options to run via an API or on your own server to enjoy a helpful tool that you can use for a multitude of tasks.

Text Summary

Need to skim a conversation, article, or technical document? There’s no easier way to do that than generating a summary with AI. Text processing capabilities of large language models allow quickly figuring out key points and grasping the text structure to build an accurate outline of bulky text input.

Imagine having to read a 10 page paper or a long web article just to understand key findings and conclusions. AI can save hours of work without missing important points. Based on your preference, you can get a brief one-paragraph summary or a structured rundown containing all analyzed problems, examined data and proposed solutions.

Nextcloud Assistant is not only here to help with writing, but also with text analysis. It can provide compact summaries for any texts you throw in to easily paste in a text file or a message.

Nextcloud Assistant is a great tool for text analysis. It can provide compact summaries for any texts you throw in to easily paste in a text file or a message.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

Headline generation

A good headline is a major part of an article’s success. However, creative block or a lack of outsider’s perspective can sometimes get writers stuck with otherwise straightforward tasks. With generative AI, getting inspiration for a sharp and professional headline is a piece of cake.

In Nextcloud Hub, you can use Nextcloud Assistant to create headline ideas for your articles and web pages, summoning it from the navigation bar or right in the Text app. The command is pre-configured for you and doesn’t require a prompting skill.

Email thread summary

We all deal with bulky email threads at some point, and fairly often it is easy to get lost in the year-long conversation when you need to find certain information or provide a summary of your discussion. Just like getting a plain text summary, you can easily generate one based on the email history.

There are two ways to do it: manually via chat like with ChatGPT and by using a specialized summary tool. The ‘Thread Summary’ feature in Nextcloud Hub powered by Nextcloud Assistant brings the quality of communication to a whole new level while caring about your privacy.

Packed in an easy-to-use interface inside your Mail app, Thread Summary is reachable right from your thread to sum up the ideas, questions and to-dos brought up by participants. Nextcloud Assistant is open-source and hosted where you want it: on your server, in a data center you trust, or in the cloud of your choice.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

It’s not a surprise that some email threads contain sensitive business information. Exposure of such texts may threaten not only your and your company’s privacy, but also that of your valued partners and clients. We strongly advise you to only use the tools you can trust to summarize your emails unless you want to end up in somebody’s database, or even a publicly available one.

AI speech-to-text dictation

Remember the time we all dreamed of typing from our spoken word without a keyboard? In fact, the speech recognition has been around for years, but with the arrival of tools like OpenAI and Whisper it really began to shine.

Speech-to-text dictation enables you to save a great deal of time when composing texts in both communication and writing, making it a great addition to all types of AI-powered content collaboration tools. Using voice typing to compose emails, chat with colleagues, draft documents, or make notes — those are just a handful of possible applications.

In Nextcloud, dictation with AI of your choice is available suite-wise via the Smart Picker menu. It only takes one command to activate the feature, no matter where you are. Use the Smart Picker in Talk, Mail, Deck, Collectives, or other native Hub apps.

Try it in Nextcloud Hub

Speech transcription

Not quite the same as dictation, speech transcription helps convert pre-recorded audio to text. Multiple apps offer such tools to get summaries for YouTube videos, converting audio and video content into articles and more.

In Nextcloud, we found a way to improve the videoconferencing experience with the very same tool. Using the features of OpenAI or LocalAI in Talk, you can record team calls and get accurate written records of the meeting delivered to you in a text file. When enabled, the feature provides you with a transcription upon the end of the meeting together with the video recording. Use it to keep the meeting records for future reference, provide summaries to your team members, or even write interview articles based on calls.

Why use Nextcloud? If you value privacy and want to keep your collaborators at ease, you can keep the recordings and transcriptions locally. Running on your server and being open-source, AI tools available in Nextcloud are ethical, transparent and leak-proof.

Translation

Quick translation in chats, documents, marketing texts, or mail communication saves time and keeps browser tabs clean. With many AI-powered services available today, you can decide where your texts are processed and what translation model is used.

We advise you to take better care of how your work travels around the web. That’s why in Nextcloud there are different translation apps available for integration. Some of them you can even run locally.

Available on-premises tools include Local translation built using Opus models developed by the University of Helsinki and LibreTranslate. Both apps are open-source and operate independently without external processing. Another option is using the DeepL translator. It provides a wide range of available languages, but uses proprietary model and connects to the DeepL website.

Face and object recognition

A technology called ‘computer vision’ allows the machine to analyze images and videos to understand and interpret their content. Based on the training data and methodology, the AI can identify patterns and features, categorize media, and select independent objects.

It is a truly vast field of artificial intelligence. Image analysis with AI introduces multiple useful applications of visual recognition and media generation, from image and video editing to real-time visual effects in video conferencing. For example, the iPhone camera roll puts photos in automatic categories and Zoom applies dynamic backgrounds to your streams using computer vision.

As with any AI that manipulates your content, you must be aware of the privacy risks. For instance, Zoom’s March 2023 TOS update directly states that the company is permitted to use your content to train its AI model:

In Nextcloud, we offer locally running object recognition tools that won’t share your content with third parties for training purposes. Recognize app in Nextcloud categorizes media in your Nextcloud Photos collection based on objects it recognizes on your pictures. For instance, faces, landscapes, food, vehicles, landmarks and buildings, and more. In Nextcloud Talk, machine learning is used to apply backgrounds and blur to your picture during the calls. To implement this feature, we use the Jitsu library and a model called MediaPipe. Both are open source and self-hosted, securing a Green rating among our AI apps.

What is Nextcloud’s Ethical AI Rating and how do you choose the right AI-powered content collaboration tools consciously? Read below!

Nextcloud’s Ethical AI Rating

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Privacy-first content collaboration platform powered by open source AI

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The post 8 innovative AI features to use in a content collaboration platform appeared first on Nextcloud.

What is a push notification?

At Nextcloud, push notifications are designed to protect users and their data. Since push notifications on your iPhone or Android phone depend on Apple and Google, we made an effort to implement ours with your data privacy in mind.

How do push notifications at Nextcloud work?

Thanks to the Nextcloud Push Proxy, the free, hosted service from Nextcloud, notifications are sent through the proxy and not directly to Google and Apple to prevent any data going to them from your instance.

Nextcloud’s push notifications are this secure because of encryption. When you log into one of our mobile applications (like the iOS Files app), a public and private key are generated on the device itself and the public key is sent to your Nextcloud instance. When a push notification is sent to your device, that public key is used to encrypt the data before sending it to the Nextcloud Push Proxy. Only after receiving the notification on the device, it is decrypted using the private key of the device.

Overall, our push notifications enable you to be the one in control – not even Nextcloud can gain access to your data.

Benefits of mobile push notifications

1. Doesn’t drain your battery

If you always kept your application open, your battery would drain quite fast and not be efficient at all. That’s why our push notifications are implemented right into your operating system.

2. Speed

Push notifications are instant, without delay. This makes them great for calls and messages in Nextcloud Talk.

3. Convenience

When a file or chat message is shared with you, you’re informed right away on your mobile device.

For a new chat message on iOS, a notification banner will pop up even if your phone is locked and you can directly open the file from the push notification.

For a new file on iOS, simply click on the push notification and you’re taken to your notifications page where you can then go to the file.

Whether you’re away from your laptop or not, you won’t miss any important updates.

Want to learn more?

In Nextcloud Talk for iOS and Android, we have extensive documentation for debugging and troubleshooting push notifications available. Get access in the links below!

See documentation

See documentation

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