Thoughts, stories and ideas.
As promised in the first blog post about the Nextcloud App Ecosystem, here comes the second one about all the official Nextcloud Apps that are disabled by default.
To understand the different types of apps better, I would categorize them as following so far: Continue reading “More official Nextcloud Apps”
Last Saturday at Nextcloud conference in Berlin the Nextcloud Box was announced. Frank said it’s a part of his promise/desire to make the world a better place by bringing your data home.
How can the world be a better place with Nextcloud Box? Continue reading “First setup of my Nextcloud Box”
Today the contributor conference started. Yesterday was more business oriented, today the “get things done phase” starts.
Jos opened the conference with a few words, Frank, Joe and Jane repeated their announcements of the Nextcloud box and 50 boxes are available to buy here at the conference for 70 Euro. The missing RaspberryPi is provided for free. Frank said, that he’s looking for a possibility to sell Nextcloud Box as a complete package. Continue reading “Nextcloud Conference – Saturday”
I had no idea what to expect from this conference but something inside said to me
Go to Berlin, it’s important!
So I went to Berlin to attend at least two days of the conference at Technische Universität. The Berlin Technische Universität is one of the largest and most prestigious research and education institutions in Germany and for a whole week the center of the growing Nextcloud community.
In Frank Karlitscheks talk about the future of Nextcloud he also talked about sustainability and the way how Nextcloud will develop in the next 20! years:
“We are a bit of a boring German company 😉 the whole company is about sustainability” #nextcloudconf #nextcloud pic.twitter.com/vI60hfD2UX
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
During the talk, he showed Nextcloud 10 features und someone from the audience asked when this version with all these nice features will be released (easy answer, it was released a few weeks ago). In the meantime Klaas tweeted two feature request
Lukas Reschke talked about Nextcloud security architecture. I liked the idea that the same developers who wrote the code are responsible for fixing their own bugs.
Bjoern Schiessle is working since four years on the federation subject and showed an overview of the ideas behind the concept and it’s future.
The whole cloud federation thing is so important – listening to @schiessle #nextcloudconf pic.twitter.com/fSCbrgQmyN
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
In Nextcloud, it’s possible to share your files with a remote user. A remote user is a user in another personal cloud installation that supports the federation concept (e.g. Nextcloud, OwnCloud, Pydio). To share a file you have to insert the cloud ID of that user [username]@[domain] and Nextcloud sends a notification to the remote user. The remote user can decide whether he wants to accept the share.
You find your own Cloud ID in your Nextcloud profile page. Share it!
You can find your cloud id in your profile #nextcloudconf #federation #lasttweet pic.twitter.com/GSTYtKTgKR
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
Oli Sennhauser (FromDual) gave a talk about MySQL database scalability. The interesting thing for me was that he was not familiar with the Nextcloud software. So he asked users and developers in the audience questions how Nextcloud is handling this and that. Based on the answers he described possible problems and solutions.
Learning about database scalability with Oli from @fromdual #nextcloudconf pic.twitter.com/ai6A9e7Fb8
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
After the lunch break I missed half of Arthur Schiwons talk about User Management in Nextcloud. Nextcloud has a variety of authentication mechanisms needed to fit comfortably in the diverse enterprise authentication landscape. I learned some new abbreviations: LDAP, SAML, ODP, ….
User management session with Arthur Schiwon #nextcloudconf #ldap pic.twitter.com/lCd2Fni85Z
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
This talk was interesting too because Dennis Pennings (360ict.nl) is planning to set up a huge Nextcloud installation. He researched a lot about possible solutions and he had plenty of question that were discussed at the end together with Frank and the audience.
Still discussing large installations #scalability #docker #redis #loadbalancers. Interesting 😉 #nextcloudconf pic.twitter.com/ni1MvTBBAy
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
So far, no slides and videos are available online. I’ll update the blog post when I find them.
During the day I saw tweets about a mysterious Nextcloud box, even an article in the German Heise Ticker (Nextcloud Box soll die Cloud ins Heim bringen).
Run Your Own Private #Ubuntu Cloud with the New #Nextcloud Box https://t.co/wdAPSVMstJ pic.twitter.com/kuCVPQAev0
— OMG! UBUNTU! (@omgubuntu) September 16, 2016
At 6pm the Nextcloud box was presented by Frank. I decided to install Periscope and tried to stream the event. After the third try it worked! Here are the exiting 20 minutes!
LIVE on #Periscope: Sorry for confusion- now it seems to work #nextcloudconf #surprise https://t.co/rzmgtmg344
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
Directly after the “surprise show” Jos arrived with 50 Nextcloud Boxes and I bought one (70Euro).
The first Nextcloud box being sold at #nextcloudconf, 8 more followed soon after. pic.twitter.com/PM4Mffaibs
— Robin Appelman (@icewind1991) September 16, 2016
The next guy in the queue was Guido Stepken and he bought seven!
7 #nextcloud boxes are going to Berlin schools, sponsored by @GuidoStepken pic.twitter.com/hTLmF6E0sd
— Hagen Graf (@hagengraf) September 16, 2016
While writing the blog post I saw that nearly the same box design exists for the Open Source Media Center (OSMC PiDrive).
Update Sept 17th: I just learned that the OSMC PiDRive is based on the Nextcloud Box design. It is and was the intention of Nextcloud to offer the box design to other projects.
The day was super interesting an now I have to sleep. See you tomorrow!
The Nextcloud community will be meeting at the TU Berlin from September 16 to 22 for a week of talks and coding around the next generation private cloud technology.
Finally I managed to be able to attend. Due to a lot of reasons only on Friday and Saturday, but hey – I’m happy to have these two days full of keynotes, workshops, lightning talks and discussions.
IoT fans, business owners, c-level execs, rainmakers, you’re all welcome at the Nextcloud Conference https://t.co/pGEtSqPugK #nextcloudconf
— Olivier Paroz (@oparoz) August 31, 2016
Join @michael_meeks at the #nextcloudconf to improve @CollaboraOffice integration! https://t.co/R6MWcj52zd
— Nextcloud (@Nextclouders) September 3, 2016
If you are in Berlin this weekend use the opportunity to join us (Straße des 17. Juni 135)! Don’t miss Friday 6pm – We’ll gather in the main room for the announcement of… well, a surprise!
After that: free drinks and snacks!
See you there!
So I installed Nextcloud Server and the Nextcloud iOS App and the OS X desktop client. I’m syncing my photos and other files and I’m so happy that everything works. I mean, not in the way “Yeah, it works somehow and I like it because it’s open source software and they are the good ones”. No, it’s more like
It works
fineawesome, the data is were I need it! I don’t have to think about!
But the best thing is …
I discovered Nextcloud Apps! They are hidden behind the little + in this popup.
I didn’t know, that there is a whole ecosystem behind that little +. Beside the shipped apps there will be a whole new App Store created by Bernhard Posselt and many other contributors. As far as I know the Nextcloud App Store will be fully operational from the Nextcloud version 11 release (will be in 2016) on. The beta version is already online and it looks promising (https://apps.nextcloud.com/).
Before we talk about the future let’s have a look what is already available. The core nextcloud server package comes with official apps, which are developed by Nextcloud directly and with approved apps. Approved apps are developed and supported by the community and approved by Nextcloud as “so good” to ship them with the core package.
The following Apps are official and enabled. They are the real core package of your Nextcloud Server. Because they are necessary and simply working I didn’t pay a lot attention when I installed Nextcloud for the first time but it’s worth to have a look what the whole core system is about.
Activity is a kind of Facebook timeline. You can see, ordered by date, all your shares, comments, favourites, uploads and the activities of remote users who are connected to you via the federation system.
Logging is necessary and in this case it’s about PHP. You can choose what to log and you can download the log file to look for the reason of the entries.
Every user can tag files. The tags are stored and offered to all the users. It’s a great feature for your personal cloud or for teams. If you run a bigger installation with plenty of users that didn’t know each other you should disable this app to avoid confusion.
Yeah, it’s possible to comment on files
This app enables users to restore files that were deleted from the system. Restoring a file also restores related file versions (versions app has to be enabled).
Federation allows you to connect with other trusted servers.
The file sharing app implements the whole process of sharing files within Nextcloud server.
This app enables the popup that appears when a user logs in for the first time.
The app send notifications for example when you receive a remote share.
Manages the password policy on your Nextcloud Server. Common passwords are taken from https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/tree/master/Passwords
I uploaded most of my books to have enough to read …
Enables external systems to communicate via API with Nextcloud. For example the url http://admin:secret@example.com/ocs/v1.php/cloud/users -d userid="joecool"-d password="secret" creates the user joecool with the password secret.
Information about current CPU load, memory usage and active users.
Create a new file online and write something! The screenshot is a gif animation including a problem that is solved by Nextcloud itself … have a look!
You are already wondering about the nice orange color on top of the screenshots?
Have a look at my login page (https://cloud.cocoate.com) and upload a nice log in image to your personal cloud!
It displays update notifications. I saw it for the contacts app but I was to slow to take a screenshot (next time).
Sends anonymized data to help to improve Nextcloud. You can disable it at any time.
This application automatically maintains older versions of files that are changed.
Video player
Yes, there is a video player in Nextcloud! Click the link (https://cloud.cocoate.com/index.php/s/By6txeI6Hws38B8) for my shared video of @maxilamps.
Nextcloud – Video Player
My initial plan was to try out and describe the Nextcloud apps. What I described so far in this blog post is a short glimpse on the official apps which are enabled by default! There are more official apps you can enable at any time (Default encryption module, External sites, External storage support, External user support, File access control, Files automated tagging, Gallery, LDAP user and group backend, Mail template editor, Retention, SAML authentication) and there are also the approved apps which can be enabled by just one click (News, Bookmarks, Documents, Tasks, JavaScript XMPP Chat, OwnBackup, ownNote – Notes Application, QOwnNotesAPI,Shorten).
May be now you get a better impression what the Nextcloud ecosystem is about and how interesting it already is!
Now I’ll start to play around with the “not enabled” official apps and will come back soon with a new blog post.
tl;dr: The Nextcloud ecosystem is an amazing collection of useful apps and it’s growing and improving every day. Have a look at it!