I’m super happy to report that ownCloud 9.0 is released today. This is the biggest and most important ownCloud release so far with a ton of performance improvements, bug fixes, cleanup but also new features.
Especially exiting is that fact that more people have contributed to this release then ever before. We also collaborated more with partners then ever. Examples are CERN and AARNET. This is possible because of the open and community oriented development process of ownCloud.
Most of the improvements happened in this 3 areas:
Collaboration
The introduction of comments and tags combined with the improved notifications and activity feed allows better user interaction. You can comment on any file and see the comments of others. Tags will help you organize your files and give you the ability to filter files on tags in the left sidebar.
The reworked notifications separate out the activity feed with a view of what’s happening with your files from events you should respond to like new shares or calendar notifications. This makes it a lot easier to keep track of what is going on with your data! This blog post is a nice summary of the improvements.
Full Federation
It is one of the main goals of ownCloud, since the beginning, to enable everyone to run their own server but still collaborate and share with others. Sharing between different ownCloud servers is possible for a while now. But this is easier than ever with cross-server user name auto complete, trusted servers and more. Once you’ve shared with another ownCloud server, it will be added as a trusted server, exchanging user names. This will enable ownCloud to auto complete names from users of all shared servers. Admins have control over these features, so they can add trusted servers manually and disable the automatic addition.
We released the ownCloud Federation API last summer as a first draft. Since then we collected a lot of feedback and improved the specification. I’m super happy that other projects and cloud software started to adopt this API to become compatible. The first one is Pydio who will support this Federation API in their next release later this month.
Ultimate Scalability
ownCloud already scaled from Raspberry Pi for 1-10 users, to up to 500,000 users. But some of the bigger ownCloud users requested more.
So we implemented a new storage API that enables deeper integration with storage solutions and we updated the sharing code to handles more shares with more users.
This was developed in collaboration with international research institutions like CERN and AARNet. This enables ownCloud to scale to multi petabytes and breaking existing barriers for file sync and share!
opensource.com has all the details.
And more
Besides these major improvements, there has been work in many other areas of ownCloud:
– Both Calendar and Contacts have been updated for ownCloud 9
– A brand new, stand-alone updater will ensure smoother upgrades from 9.0 and onwards
– Code Signing ensures the integrity of your ownCloud installation
– App updates are more visible
Additionally more and more 3rdparty apps are developed for ownCloud and become ready. They are technically not part of ownCloud 9.0 but show the flexibility of ownCloud as a platform.
Great examples are:
– Collaborative editing with LibreOffice
– Videoconferencing with Spreed.me
– ownCloud Music player
– ownCloud News
– Announcement Center
– ownCloud Mail
– ownCloud Documents
More information and screenshots can be found on the official 9.0 feature page here: https://owncloud.org/nine
ownCloud contains code contributions from over 940 people now. Additionally we got a lot more contributions in Translations, Testing, Packaging, Marketing, Promotion, Design and other important areas that are not included in this numbers.
But we can always use more help! Get involved on owncloud.org/contribute
Thanks a lot to everyone who is part of this great community.
Grab 9.0 now here: https://owncloud.org/install/