This year’s summer holiday season was a bit different, we hope you are fine and had a nice summer anyways. You know what is totally worth a visit and not subject to any travel warnings? The new ownCloud.com. We completely redesigned and reworked our website to give Community and Enterprise users unified and straightforward access to ownCloud. The old .org and .com websites, created in a previous chapter of our history, did not match what ownCloud stands for today – open-source software that works on an enterprise level, with a professional community and a strong focus on security and digital sovereignty.
Speaking of security and digital sovereignty: One good path towards both of those goals is a self-hosted ownCloud on a NAS in your office. So we are very excited that QNAP, the foremost purveyor of business-grade Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, is now an ownCloud partner! Our global strategic partnership focuses on providing ownCloud as a certified solution on all of QNAP’s devices that support QTS 4.4 or newer through the QNAP App Center with just a few clicks. Users will be able to upgrade from the Community Edition to the Enterprise Edition without reinstallation.
Even apart form QNAP NAS installations, the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition now share a tarball. With the introduction of ownCloud Server 10.5, we have consolidated the download packages to contain all supported apps. If you want to upgrade from Community to Enterprise, you now just need a license key. Oh, and there is a new, simplified trial process to test the Enterprise risk-free for 30 days.
Other than the consolidated download packages, the ownCloud Server 10.5 brings nice new features like manual file locking so others don’t save to files you currently work on. 10.5 finally supports this year’s crop of Linux LTS distros like Ubuntu 20.4 out of the box through its PHP 7.4 compatibility. In federation use cases, the experience for users now resembles working in a local ownCloud thanks to a new and improved background job that syncs changes across federated shares, even taking care of meta-data.
The ownCloud iOS App also hit the App Store in a new version: 11.4 includes a host of improvements big and small. Users now get to choose which feature can use cellular data. They also get the option to fully disable cellular data usage. The new share sheet imports nearly everything from nearly everywhere.
The ownCloud beta and testing program has gotten a makeover as part of the new website, too. You now find all there is to test for the Desktop App, the Android App and the iOS App, like TestFlights, tech previews and release candidates, in one place on the dedicated beta and testing page. And if you join our beta program, you’ll get notified when new versions are available for testing.
Even with the parliamentary summer breaks in Europe ending, it is still not clear how the EU, namely the European Commission, will react to the ECJ ruling from mid-July, dismantling the Privacy Shield data transfer agreement with the US. With transfers of EU citizens’ personal data now practically illegal, there is increased attention on alternatives to the cloud storage offers that US-based tech giants provide. In its September issue, the German business monthly Manager Magazin portrays ownCloud as one among the European firms that provide users and businesses with data sovereignty. Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest daily newspapers, also mentions ownCloud as one of the firms businesses now turn to in trying to rebuild their processes in a compliant manner.
The personal take of the month, by Michael Stingl, Teamlead Mobile/Desktop
With the new 11.4 version of the iOS App, ownCloud takes big step towards the future. It is the first brandable iOS App version that is also compatible with our upcoming new server architecture so our Enterprise customers can leverage all those improvements in style – their style, that is, through theming. To make sure iOS app version numbers are unambiguous, we’ve taken another big step, this time numerical, from version 1.3 to 11.4. That’s because the last brandable version was the legacy app with its version number 3.8. The amount of advances in the app also justify the version number jump, for this version contains the improvements of half a year of development work.
11.4 is also the first version of the ownCloud iOS App that is available as a dedicated EMM version. It contains all the premium features already unlocked instead of as In-App purchases. It also contains a number of Mobile Device Management (MDM) settings and features that are useful to corporate IT departments and are normally reserved for our Enterprise customers. The EMM App is available through the Apple Business Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) and enables organizations that use the ownCloud Community Edition to purchase those advanced features.
I want to personally thank all of our great engineers that made those advances possible through countless hours of coding, thinking and testing at home amidst a pandemic. You did a great job!