Numerous contributors to the ownCloud project gathered in Nuremberg last week to get updates about what is happening within ownCloud and discuss future developments. Whether in the lectures on stage, in the breaks or in the workshops, the quality and diversity of the contributions was overwhelming. The discussions gave the project many positive impulses to further develop ownCloud in the interest of the users.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all participants! Without the broad community and strong partnerships, ownCloud would not be what it is today: the world’s leading open source file sharing software, which places the control of the users over their own data in the centre of its activities.
ownCloud is a very complex project with many different aspects, so it was important that we could gather and learn from each other. More than 180 participants attended the 4 day long ownCloud Conference to share their experience and accomplishments.
Spreading Ideas: this Year’s Interesting Talks
Many interesting discussions happened on stage, between the speeches or in collaborative sessions – but the highlights surely were the talks. Speakers from many different fields of expertise talked about current developments, upcoming ideas, and best practices. An overview:
- Felix von Leitner held the keynote about admin antipatterns and how to avoid common mistakes:
- Semih Serhat Karakaya shared his experience with integrating Rocket.Chat into ownCloud. Last year he was ownCloud’s GSoC student and talked about his security app:
- Ksenia Fedoruk presented OnlyOffice and its ownCloud integration:
- Michael Meeks showed how to deploy and configure Collabora:
- Felix Heidecke gave an overview on Phoenix, the new ownCloud frontend, and organized a hands-on-workshop on how to write apps for it:
- Christian Schmitz gave a talk about the ownCloud foundation, its future, and how to participate:
- Tom Needham introduced the ownCloud customer success team and gave an insight in the communication workflow:
- Holger Dyroff gave his legal advice with ownCloud and GDPR compliance:
We can’t mention everyone of course – but it was a lot of awesome input in many fields. The “Best of Breeds” approach of ownCloud was very apparent. ownCloud may be a very good solution for File Sync & Share, but for other features, it just makes sense to integrate other open source solutions.
The best examples are PrivacyIDEA for multi-factor-authentication, Kopano for groupware, Collabora or OnlyOffice for collaborative document editing, Rocket.Chat for chatting, or DAVDroid for syncing contacts… all of them were present and showed how enhancing ownCloud with other open source solutions can benefit your deployment.
There are recordings of all of the talks, make sure to follow us on Twitter and/or Youtube to get the Videos.
Big thanks go out to our media partners c3voc, O’Reilly, openSUSE media team, and dpunkt.verlag for covering the talks and making this event possible!
Video Statements
The ownCloud Conference was, of course, a place of exchange and joint assessment. On this occasion, ownCloud representatives will give their personal view of the project, the future of ownCloud, their expectations for the near future and what the ownCloud Conference means for them.
Tobias Gerlinger, CEO of ownCloud, sees the last year as a further milestone in technical development, but also according to growing acceptance in the market. Data protection and security are becoming more and more important to the public and open source file sharing provides many answers to urgent security questions.
COO Holger Dyroff is also looking forward to the near future, which with features such as file classification promises another significant improvement in document security for many users of ownCloud. The data protection policy big bang of last year, the GDPR, encouraged the ownCloud project in its efforts to always put security first and make no compromises in data protection.
Christian Schmitz, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer (CSIO), was able to announce an important milestone in his presentation: The establishment of the ownCloud Foundation. The foundation, which was founded two years ago, ensures that the Open Source project remains in the hands of the community in the long term. In addition to representatives of large-scale ownCloud installations such as CERN or AArNet, the foundation’s board of directors also includes two representatives of the community who are democratically elected.
ownCloud´s CTO Felix Böhm provided valuable insights into how the support process could be significantly improved last year and how the ownCloud product was further stabilized. The company has made significant investments in improving quality and the improvements have also been well received by users. At the end of the day there was a strong commitment: ownCloud is Open Source and will always remain Open Source!
The Party
As last year, we had an amazing night at the Harlem Bar. We… better don’t say more than that 😉
Friday – Time for a Hackfest!
The next morning, we took a day for more creative sessions. It was a fertile soil for technical ideas, and maybe you will see some of them implemented until the next conference – last year we talked the first time about the Virtual File System, which was released just the day before this year’s conference.
So the highlight sessions of this year were:
- OSI Layer 8, a great talk by Markus Feilner on security issues sitting in front of Computers
- An initiative by Jonathan Kawohl for an international regulation entity for the protection of private data.
- The attendees gathered up to discuss and work on topics that might result in talks for next years conference.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
And last but not least, we want to thank our sponsoring partners. You made this event possible with your contributions. Thanks for supporting our community!
See you at the next Conference!
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