Federated Cloud Sharing

The Federated Cloud Sharing feature enables ownCloud users to easily and seamlessly share files and folders with users of other ownCloud instances and compatible file collaboration platforms across locations, organizations and jurisdictions.

Through the course of this filesharing process, each organization gets to maintain its individual control and security protocols.

How Federated Cloud Sharing works

Users simply enter a Federated Cloud ID (an address in the format  instead of a local username) to share files or folders with the other party, who can then edit those.

Federation can also be harnessed to connect branches of an organization that reside in different jursidictions and hence are subject to controls of data exports. In this case, each branch could run an ownCloud and federation share files and folders that are not subject to data export restrictions.

Administrators have the privilege to disable federated fileshare, while the owner of the file continues to retain control over the master file.

Simple, Straightforward Collaboration and Teamwork

If administrators register the ownCloud instances of partner organizations as trusted servers in their ownCloud and thereby exchange address books, users can even search for the people they want to share files with, with a local username, instead of needing to know their Federated Cloud ID.

With ownCloud 10.5, Federated Cloud Sharing has become even more seamless through a new background process that scans federated shares for updates on files an their metadata. It makes teamwork even more straightforward for those collaborating across different ownClouds.

Federated Cloud Sharing scales!

Federation allows your enterprise to scale without limitations across borders. At the same time, your sensitive data stays safe and secure in the datacenter of origin. What’s more – you can easily add more data hubs, distribute the workload across them, implement security models and allow users to collaborate across various data hubs.