With ownCloud Server 10.9, developers have worked on improving performance. Server 10.9 will speed up drastically how ownCloud clients do their initial discovery of the contents in user accounts. Especially scenarios with many files and large directory structures (e.g., from integrated Windows Network Drives or other external storages) will benefit, users will notice significantly faster behavior and less waiting. Starting with the new version, clients do not need to check every single folder anymore, instead, the server is composing a full content listing and will already stream it to the client while it is still being created. The upcoming versions of ownCloud iOS, Android and Desktop Clients will be able to use this feature.
Define User Groups that can Unlock Files
Manual File Locking, supported in ownCloud since version 10.5 is meant to prevent concurrent changes of files by different users. A user who locked a file can unlock it again or specify a timeout for the lock. With version 10.9 ownCloud introduces a new feature that allows administrators to define groups of users that are entitled to unlock files locked by other users. This has proven very helpful when a lock owner has used and a long timeout for file locks but is unavailable to remove it. Administrators can find the configuration in the Manual File Locking section of the General admin settings.
File Versions: Store and Display the Author of File Versions
This new feature for file versioning in Server 10.9 shall improve usability: Storing and displaying the author of file versions can be very helpful to keep track of who changed what in the history of a file. Users can now also have the author of file versions stored and displayed – with a mouse click: When enabled, the author of file versions will emerge in the ‘Versions’ tab of the right sidebar in the web interface. Author metadata will be stored in files on the storage once the feature has been enabled. The function is deactivated by default because it is not compatible with all use cases. However, administrators can activate it via a simple command.
Restrict Public Link Sharing to Certain Groups
In certain scenarios it is not desired that all users of an ownCloud installation can create public links and share data publicly. For this, administrators now can define if their users can share data publicly (through public links). A new configuration option allows restricting the creation of public links to users in certain groups.
Other notable changes
In addition, the ownCloud developers have provided some apps with updates, including Media Viewer, PDF Viewer and Windows Network Drive. Media Viewer for example now allows users to configure the quality of preview images, and a bug about image orientation information from EXIF has been fixed in the new version – Images will appear in the correct orientation in the Media Viewer. Version 10.9 of ownCloud also adds support for MariaDB 10.6. We recommend you read the documentation carefully before upgrading to this database version. As announced in the previous minor releases of ownCloud Server, from version 10.9 onward ownCloud Server no longer supports PHP 7.2. If you’re running on PHP 7.2 or below, it is necessary to upgrade PHP prior to conducting the upgrade to Server 10.9. See the system requirements for more information.
Download, Release notes, Blog
For more detailed information about the new features and improvements in ownCloud Server 10.9 please visit the release notes.
