This awesome release brings many new features. Among them, I’m most excited about the server to server sharing.
Server to server sharing is a first step in true federation of data with ownCloud: you can add a folder shared with you from another ownCloud instance into your own. Next step would of course be to also share things like user accounts and data like chat, contacts, calendar and more. These things come with their own challenges and we’re not there yet, but if you want to help work on it – join us for the ownCloud Contributor Conference in Berlin next month!
A close runner-up in terms of excitement for me are the improvements to ownCloud Documents – real-time document editing directly on your ownCloud! We have been updating this through the 6.0.x series so the only ‘unique’ ownCloud 7 feature is the support for transparently converting MS Word documents, but that is a feature that makes Documents many times more useful!
There are many more features, you can find more details on the ownCloud website. The official announcement blog post is here.
A big THANK YOU
This would not have been possible without the hard work of the ownCloud community, so a big thank-you goes out to everybody who contributed! We have a large team of almost 100 regular contributors, making ownCloud one of the largest Open Source projects and that makes me proud.
Of course we have a lot of work to do: revelations of companies and governments spying on people keep coming out and our work is crucial to protect our privacy for the future. If you want to help out with this important work, consider contributing to ownCloud. We can use help in many areas, not just coding. Translation, marketing and design are all important for the success of ownCloud!
The release of ownCloud 7 is not only the conclusion of a lot of hard work by the ownCloud community, but also a new beginning! Not only will we release updates to this release, fixing issues and adding translations, but the community now also starts to update the numerous ownCloud apps to ownCloud 7.
Expect more from us. Now, go, install ownCloud 7 and let me know what you think of it!