ownCloud can look back on a successful development in 2017: With ownCloud X and the marketplace we laid the foundation for the successful future of ownCloud. We say 2017: Mission Accomplished and Welcome 2018!
Quality
ownCloud has invested massively in quality assurance, and this is bearing fruit. The ownCloud releases of last year show the focus of ownCloud on stability and quality. We have succeeded in reducing the number of our support cases by more than 30% with a significant increase in the number of customers. We will continue along this path in 2018. Stability and quality are the core concerns of our developers and users. We believe that good and stable software makes the world a little better every day. We subject all new features to extensive QA.
LTS
With ownCloud X we introduced the first ownCloud version with long time support. We will support ownCloud X until spring 2020. ownCloud X‘s successor will be released in the spring of 2019. This gives ownCloud administrators a window of one year to upgrade from a major version to the next major version. Our experience has shown that instances with several hundred thousand users plan, test and then execute updates over a longer period of time. In order to allow large ownCloud instances to be prepared for major updates, the support of an LTS version overlaps with the next one by one year.
Security
The secure OAuth2 (find out more about oAuth2 here) authentication workflow across all clients simplifies user management and protects ownCloud users and their credentials against unauthorized access. The OAuth2 implementation was started by the community for integrating with Moodle. Google Summer of Code Student Semih Serhat Karakaya developed the ownCloud security app including a brute force protection. For enterprise security a protection against ransomware attacks is available. Overall we improved our security on any platform: Server, desktop and mobile clients.
Architecture & Marketplace
ownCloud relies on modularisation: We decided to stop putting all the code into the core. We take an example of modern software development and rely on a small and light core with pure core functionality. Additional features can be added modularly via the marketplace. The strict separation of the individual features increases the development speed. Fixes can be implemented faster. The new Marketplace is the place to go to get the newest apps and features in and around ownCloud. It is also the place for developers to publish their apps and get their code running on large instances. E.g. the ownCloud Xmas app developed during the open engineering week was already downloaded more than 1200 times and installed on one of the biggest ownCloud instances out there.
LDAP
The LDAP integration has undergone major refactoring with more than 3,474 new lines of code and 4,392 removed from 14 different contributors, increasing quality and ensuring more reliable integration as well as huge performance improvements, especially for large instances. Stay tuned for more information.
If you haven’t yet update your LDAP app now!
Clients
We have made massive improvements to all of our sync clients. Here too, the keywords are quality and security. We implemented OAuth2 authentication on Android, IOS and in the desktop client. Overall we want to offer the best UX possible and streamline it on all platforms.
Desktop
In 2017 we made huge progress with the Desktop Client. The ownCloud Desktop client now ships with its own QT 5.6.2 on all Platforms. This eliminates many errors from different system-delivered Qt versions, resolves dependency issues and improves overall stability. The data flow and general interaction with an ownCloud server was improved in several ways. The client is now able to adapt to a wider range of redirections, so it can transparently adapt when servers switch URLs. Additionally we made several advances to the sync behaviour: the new dynamic chunking logic results in faster uploads. Last but not least we improved the UX massively and implemented better File handling.
Make sure you are running the latest ownCloud Desktop Client and Download it now!
IOS
Besides fixing a bunch of bugs, we implemented video streaming and .gif support for an enhanced Multimedia experience. With ownCloud X as a server you can now share files on your IOS app with custom groups and make multiple share links for each file. This comes in handy when you want to grant different persons shares with different permissions. For the techies we implemented the ability to edit Latex files.
Update to the latest ownCloud ios app!
Android
As on IOS you can now generate multiple Share links with android app. Video Streaming and.gif support is now available for android, also. We implemented the possibility of anonymous file uploads when sharing a folder. We also made some improvements in the UI to streamline the UX with the server behaviour. Since 2017 we also offer now a beta channel, so early adopters can test out and check out the new Features.
ownCloud Conference
In 2017 we organized the ownCloud Conference #oCCon17 in Nuremberg. It was a complete success for us and all visitors. More than 40 talks and workshops on 4 days provided for an extremely high level of the event. Thank you! We have learned a lot of new things and are already looking forward to the #oCCon18 with you.
Whats coming up in 2018:
Delta Sync
This feature will enable the ownCloud clients to do a differential sync on uncompressed files and increase the speed of syncing massively. With this feature it will be possible to sync just the file changes of a file instead of resyncing the entire file again.
Sharing 3.0
Sharing is the key feature and we got lots of feedback on UX and ideas for enhancements. After evaluating your input, we are working now on a bunch of improvements, like accepting shares and managing share ownerships. This will lead to a new experience in collaboration.
Object Storage
Object Storage becomes more and more important and offers an attractive price-performance ratio. Since data quantity is rising constantly, ownCloud users are searching for affordable storage solutions and we are heavily investing in object storage for more functionality and high performance uploads and downloads.
Make a difference!
Do you want to be part of the upcoming great developments in 2018?
