ownCloud has its roots in syncing and sharing files, making it easy for users to access their files on any device and share them with others. In particular, shared folders are a great productivity feature for teams.
To enable users to follow what is happening with their files, both from their own actions and those of others, ownCloud features the Activity app. You can see what is going on with all files in the global activity stream or see who did what with a particular file in the side bar. Combined with the ability to roll back to older versions of files, ownCloud provides fine grained control over your data.
With ownCloud 9.0 we push these collaboration features even further.
Comments
“You share a folder with your holiday pictures to your family and get notified when they commented on a picture”
With the new release, everyone who has access to a file or folder can also post comments on it. These will show up in the sidebar and the activity stream. It is a useful feature to discuss changes and give feedback. Thanks to the activity view and notifications, you won’t miss anything and upcoming releases of the ownCloud desktop and mobile clients will show you activity and notifications as well.
We believe that comments make ownCloud much more useful and powerful for teams working on shared files, but equally so for home users looking to share with family or friends.
Tags
ownCloud 9.0 debuts the ability to assign tags to files and folders. These tags are visible to everyone who has access to the files or folders. At work, your team can group their data based on topic, department, project or others, while at home it provides a great way to separate private and work data or make it easier to find specific things.
ownCloud allows you to filter your files based on tags with a predefined view in your left sidebar which quickly shows you all the files related to a specific subject, project or topic. Tags in ownCloud 9.0 are server-wide, that is, all users will see the tags from all other users in their tag auto-complete. For large servers or servers where users don’t collaborate, say at ownCloud providers, it is thus probably a good idea to disable the Tag app.
Tags will also enable a number of specific enterprise related use cases, stay tuned for more information about that in the coming weeks!
Applications
In the weeks after ownCloud 9.0 is out, several important ownCloud applications will become available for this release. In case of Calendar and Contacts this is a big deal as these applications have received a significant overhaul to improve the quality and compatibility of their syncing features. The Mail app is also growing up quickly and apps like ownCloud Chat enable users to work and discuss with others.
Version 1.0 of the new @ownClouders calendar app was just released and published on the app store! #ownCloudhttps://t.co/7BJqBgNYgI
— Georg Ehrke (@georgehrke) March 7, 2016
Outside of the ownCloud community, exciting things are also taking place: Collabora is getting close to their goal of bringing powerful collaborative document editing to ownCloud. The Collabora Cloud Suite is not there yet but making steady progress and already enables users to view and edit the full range of relevant office document formats like PPTX or ODS. The latest news is that multiple people can view a document, while only one can edit.
Further ahead is the Spreed app, which enables the integration of Spreed’s private video conferencing software in ownCloud. With its powerful web and app-based video, audio and text chat, Spreed brings a whole new level of communication to ownCloud.
