It’s not even been a year since Frank Karlitschek, co-founder and former CTO of ownCloud, forked ownCloud into Nextcloud. Since then, this do-it-yourself, open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud has become increasingly popular. Now, its latest version, Nextcloud 12, the program is adding more Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) features.
Perhaps the most important of these is Spreed, an end-to-end encrypted audio/video chat system. With this release, Spreed also includes support for screen sharing on the Chrome and Firefox web browsers.
There are many popular messaging systems such as Slack, Skype, and WhatsApp. What’s different about Spreed is you control the server rather than some big company. It’s this emphasis on giving you the driver’s seat that makes Nextcloud popular with users who want power and privacy.
As Karlitschek explained in an opensource.com story, “Building this kind of powerful collaboration software is the next step in file sync and share, in groupware, and for open source in general. People want to have powerful features while being in control over their data and communication.”
You can now also share and edit individual file shares. So, for example, you can share document files through public links and immediately collaborate with others in a shared editing session using Collabora Online, the cloud version of the LibreOffice suite.
Nextcloud’s heart is still IaaS — and the company has significantly improved it. The files app, probably the most used part of Nextcloud, now makes sharing the current folder easier. It also gives you the ability to move files through the menu rather than drag and drop. You can also create unique public file share links for multiple users using a new feature called Secure Drop. This makes it easier to give each user their own read/write rights, password protection, and expiration date settings.
With this new edition, you can also use the Circles app. This enables ordinary users to set up and manage file-sharing groups.
You can also now track downloads from public file directories. You can also use this to set an expiration date for shared directories and files.