The new ownCloud 5 features!

Yesterday I blogged about the ownCloud 5 release in general and I promised to blog today about all the features that are new and improved in ownCloud 5


New design
In ownCloud 5, the main navigation was redesigned to clearly differentiate it from the in-app navigations. This also allows the app more room and thus a better focus on the content of your ownCloud directories. Settings and Log-out menus were combined into a user menu on the top right, which also shows the currently logged in user and makes it more intuitive to use. The settings are further simplified and app-specific settings are moved from personal settings into the relevant apps. To help people get their data synchronized, there is a new first run page linking the desktop & mobile apps as well as documentation how to sync contacts and calendars. This information is also displayed in the personal settings – and makes getting started with ownCloud much easier for a user.

Essentially, the new design helps to concentrate more on the content and makes it easier to navigate and setup the Desktop and Mobile syncing clients.

New Antivirus App
The new antivirus system scans uploaded files for viruses. The admin can choose if infected files should be deleted automatically and/or logged/reported in the log file.

New Files Undelete feature
Now users can undelete a file that was accidentally deleted through the web interface. Simply select the files in the files undelete section and they are returned to where they were deleted, with versions maintained.

New REST APIs
A new Open Collaboration Services (OCS)-based REST API is added to access and control ownCloud remotely. The newly released OCS 1.7 spec is supported. Main feature is a new capabilities API for closer communication with the Desktop and Mobile clients. It is now very easy for ownCloud apps to provide an REST API so more API features will be added in the future.

Display names
In the interface and share dialog, display names are shown instead of the login names. The display names are easier to understand for users and can be changed by the admin. The admin can configure the display names and they can be changed by the users themselves. The display names can also be fetched from an LDAP or AD server for bigger installations. This makes it much easier to work with ownCloud, as users are identified separately from their system-generated IDs

New search engine
A new Lucene-based full text search engine app is added. People can use the search to not only find files by name but also by content. Scanning is done in the background to ensure a responsive user experience for the users.

New photo gallery
ownCloud 5 contains an improved and rewritten photo gallery. It has an improved and streamlined user interface with a slideshow feature. Photo galleries can also be shared with others.

New documentation system
There is completely new user, admin and developer documentation. The user and administrator documentation is shipped with ownCloud and available in the help menu. The developer documentation is available online.

LDAP / AD enhancements
LDAP can now search in attributes, not only in the ownCloud username. The search attributes can be configured. Multiple User/Group bases can be configured in the LDAP backend. LDAP backend supports paged results for better performance if the server offers it (requires PHP 5.4) An LDAP/AD backup resp. replica host can be configured for HA environment. Multiple LDAP / AD servers can be configured.

Enhanced external storage app
Increase performance of integrated secondary storage, including Dropbox, Swift, FTP, Google Docs, S3, WebDAV and external ownCloud servers, with a significantly faster, more efficient and easier external storage app. This is the fastest way to a personal hybrid cloud.

Improved Versioning
The versioning support for files is improved with an intelligent algorithm that automatically expires old versions if running out of space. The versioning keeps revisions every 2 seconds for the first 10 seconds, every 10 seconds for the next minute, every minute for the next hour, every hour for the next 24 hours and one revision per day until running out of space or quota.

Expanded file cache
The file cache was rebuilt in ownCloud 4.5, and underwent a minor facelift in ownCloud 5.0 to improve speed, performance of external files, and scalability of sharing. The system is also a little faster with the new file cache, and less prone to corruption in production.

Improved apps management
The management of the shipped and the 3rd-party apps in ownCloud is improved. 3rd-party apps can be easily installed from the central apps repository (apps.owncloud.com) and are automatically removed from the server if disabled. If a new version of an 3rd party app is published by the author then an update button appears on the apps page inside ownCloud and he app can easily updated with just one click. More feedback is now given to the user during long running installation and updating operations. Recommended apps are shown in the apps list with a "recommended" label so that users can find high quality apps better.

Improved bookmarks
The user interface of the bookmarks app is improved and a lot easier to use.

Improved contacts
Contacts are now organized by groups (categories) instead of address books giving more intuitive access to Friends, Coworkers, Family etc. The main view shows an overview of the most relevant fields and the amount of info adjusts automatically depending the size of the browser window or device. The web UI is now written entirely in javascript giving a more responsive user experience.

Improved syncing
The desktop syncing clients and the mobile clients have improved communication with the server and can sync faster with lower server load.

Improved calendar
The calendar has now support for classed and the option to declare events as confidential or public. The sharing is improved and compatibility with clients also extended.

General fixes
In general, there were a number of bug fixes, UI enhancements, and improvements in performance.  Most notably a 5x improvement in disk write actions, as well as better overall scalability of ownCloud across the board.

• Windows Server support extended
• PDF viewer is updated for improved performance and compatibility
• Improved media player
• Improved overall performance
• Improved download performance
• Show file size and progress during downloading

More information here: http://owncloud.org/features

Thanks a lot to everybody who made this release possible. You guys rock.

ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

Today we released ownCloud 5, a very important milestone for the ownCloud community and perhaps the most important release so far. But before going into the details I want to take a step back and look at what the original idea of ownCloud was at the beginning.

The idea of ownCloud was and is to enable everybody to host, control and sync and share their personal data without giving control away to the big data silos like Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive and iCloud. I think today we have all the features in place to say that we reached this goal. Everybody from a home user to a big enterprise can host their own personal cloud installation. I'm also super happy about the integration into KDE and GNOME because this is important to provide a really seamless experience for users.

It's a coincidence that CERN invited me to give a talk about ownCloud and data silos that I will give here in a few hours at the exact same day ownCloud 5 is released. CERN is also the place where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 22 years ago. It's interesting that the Web was built as a completely decentralized system where no distinction between someone who is publishing data and someone who is consuming data exists. There is no concept of a centralized entity that everybody connects to. Everybody can be sender and receiver at the same time. Just as Berthold Brecht proposed in 1932.

Interestingly, the web looks a bit different today where a huge amount of the traffic goes through websites like Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Amazon. Where is the idea of a decentralized and federated web?

Today we are deciding how the world will look like in the future. We, the IT community, set the course of the train that is called "open society" now and we can decide into which station the train will roll into in 5-10 years. Is it the one where all the people still control their own data and information and can decide who has access to the personal files, photos, contacts, location data, chat messages and other personal information or will we live in a future where all the personal data of all the people in the world are stored on the servers of just a few big organizations and commercial interests, terms of services and secret services decide who has access to the digital life of everybody?

If you care about these questions then join the ownCloud community or other free software projects and work on decentralized and federated alternatives.

ownCloud 5 is the result of the work of our awesome developer community. More and more people join and are getting more involved. To me this is a sign that we are doing something right and that ownCloud is not just a crazy idea that no one needs but something that is very important to a lot of people.

We did 2 major developer meeting during the development of ownCloud 5. One in Berlin and Ann Arbor in parallel last fall to do most of the ground work. And one just a few week ago in Stuttgart to really streamline and polish ownCloud 5. We will do the next developer meeting in a few month and

everybody is welcome.

ownCloud 5 is also proof that a company and an open source community can work together on a product in a very open and effective way. It is needed of course that both parties have a shared interest in the success of a product and that the development happens in the open. But I must say that I'm proud that we managed to set this up in a way that works very well.

We added a ton of cool new features in ownCloud 5. The features are interesting enough so that they deserve a blog post on their own. So tomorrow I will blog about the new ownCloud 5 features. But as important as the new features are three other things:

Quality

A lot of work to improve the quality of ownCloud went into the version 5. We launched a quality imitative during our developer meeting last fall. We introduced peer reviews for all commits that go into the core. We launched a new documentation system that has great new docs for users, administrators but also developers. We have improved application templates and sample code to help newcomers, we launched a new Jenkins-based continuous integration testing imitative with a lot of tests. We switched to a new and better bugtracker and provide daily builds of the server and the clients. This all

helped us to increase the quality of ownCloud 5 significantly.

Security

I'm so proud that we have a top notch security team at ownCloud. We have a state-of-the-art workflow when someone reports a security problem to us – including a responsible disclosure policy, publishing bugfix releases quickly and releasing advisories on our website. In ownCloud 5 we also added a few significant security enhancements including better CSRF checks, improved data sanitization and we disabled inline Javascript to prevent XSS bugs.

Performance

A lot of work went into ownCloud 5 to improve the overall performance. One of the key components is our filesystem cache and abstraction layer. This was completely rewritten to improve the performance significantly. Some tests show up to 500% faster performance compared with ownCloud 4.5. if you work with a lot of files or you have a server with a lot of users. We also looked into the overall database structure and optimized it for big installations. The sync protocol was also improved to reduce the roundtrips between the clients and the server to sync faster.

ownCloud can be downloaded here: [owncloud.org] There will me release parties in Berlin and Stuttgart including, talks from developers, on friday. So please join us if you are interested: [events]

Thanks a lot to everybody who made this release possible. You guys rock.

new years blog post

In a few hours 2012 ends and 2013 begins. So it is a good opportunity to recap and look back what happend in the past 12 month in the ownCloud world. I must say that is was an awesome year where a lot of things happened that are worth mentioning. A huge thank you to everybody in the ownCloud community and my coworkers at ownCloud Inc. which made all this possible.

The things that I specifically want to mention are:

KDE
The first significant thing of 2012 for me was the departure of the ownCloud project from KDE. This was the result of an intense discussion in KDE about the role of ownCloud in KDE, the requirements to be a KDE project and my role. I stepped down as a KDE e.V. board member and treasurer as a result and ownCloud is now an independent free software project. I still find the outcome a bit sad and not optimal for both communities but on the other hand sometimes a fresh start is good and needed. ownCloud participated in this years Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in together with KDE so there is still a lot of collaboration happening where it makes sense. All the best to KDE and thank you to my friends there.


The community
The ownCloud community grow dramatically in the last year. It's a bit difficult to measure as we don't collect real community metrics yet. But just a brief look at the number of post to the mailing-list, the activity in our bug-tracker, the number of commits, the number of contributors and the number of downloads show a very significant increase. I'm super happy that we have such a healthy volunteer community. If you found a company around an free software community projects there is sometimes the effect that the company consumes the community by employing all the community people. Luckily the free software community is growing even faster than our company so this works perfectly.
The ownCloud community has volunteers in all important areas like PHP development, Qt desktop development, iOS development, Android development, packaging, testing, security, design and UX, events and PR. Thanks to all of you who contributed.


Developer meetings
In 2012 we had 2 big developer meetings. The first one was hosted in our Stuttgart office in April with about 18 contributors. A lot of new people came and joined the community and it was the biggest meeting so far. We couldn't fit more people into the room as you can see at the pictures here: http://blog.karlitschek.de/2012/04/what-weekend.html so we had to look for a new location for the next meeting. Luckily for the fall meeting KDAB hosted us in Berlin and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor hosted a second meeting at the same time in the US. Over 30 developer attended and it was a blast. Thanks to our hosts and everybody who joined. Let's see what we do next year if we grow even bigger.


Releases
We had several great releases in 2012.
First of all we released ownCloud 3 in January, ownCloud 4 in May and ownCloud 4.5 in October. But additionally we also released our iOS and Android clients which are constantly improved and we also released the ownCloud Desktop clients for Mac, Windows and Linux.
I don't want to list all the features here but I can say that I'm super impressed by the new features the ownCloud community developed in just 12 month. I also have to confess that not every feature is as stable and bug-free as I wished. Because of that we have to concentrate more on stability and quality in the future. More about this later.
I'm especially happy about the integration with KDE and GNOME which are both already quite advanced and it's awesome that ownCloud is now packaged for all major Linux distributions and available as virtual appliances.


Development process
One year ago we had a relatively unstructured development process on gitorious.org. We wanted to focus more on quality so we introduced several processes over the last few month. We have a Jenkins server for continuous integration testing. People are working on unit tests, acceptance testing, integration testing and other things. We moved from gitorious.org to github which gave us a lot of new features for better collaborative coding and it is very successful so far. We moved from our own hosted TheBugGenie bug-tracker to the github one which is really nice because of the integration of coding, bug fixing and feature request tracking.
At our last developer meeting in Berlin we decided to introduce peer reviews for all commits that go into the ownCloud core repository and we use pull requests for that. It makes development sometimes a bit slower but you can already see the impact on quality. We are getting way better here. Of course we have to make sure that contributing to ownCloud is not more complicated as needed but I think we found a good middle ground here.


Company
I'm involved in free software for over 15 years and I think that a truly open and community driven development process, like for example in KDE, is the most effective technique to create great software and innovation. But it's also clear that communities don't work very effective in areas like QA or structured product planing where companies are better. So I always wanted to try to combine the best of both worlds. See also my blog post here for more thoughts or my chapter about open source business models in the Open-Advise book. ownCloud Inc. became fully functional at the beginning of 2012 and I must say that it works great together with the community. The community and the company are able to push ownCloud forward together in a very effective way. ownCloud Inc. employs now 35 people and closed it's second financing round this fall. We at ownCloud Inc. have already several well known customers that use ownCloud. Unfortunately we are not allowed yet to name them publicly but this will hopefully change very very soon. So this is very exciting.


Talks and booth
I'm happy that I had the opportunity to gave several talks in 2012. I presented ownCloud at LinuxCon in San Diego, at the Campus Party in Berlin, the Heidelberger Innovationsforum, the Tizen Conference in San Francisco, SIGINT in Cologne and LinuxTag in Berlin where we also had a community and a company booth. In october I had the opportunity to give a keynote at Latinoware in Brazil where I presented the User Data Manifesto.


The User Data Manifesto
This is a very important topic because it describes why ownCloud is so important to me. Running free software on your PC is not enough anymore to give you control over your data and garantee freedom and free speach. A free cloud service software like ownCloud is needed. I don't have to repeat the thinking behind that because I described it already well in this blog post This is the reason why I started ownCloud in the first place and what keeps me, and I think most of the community, motivated.


2013?
So I think 2012 was a great year but what are the challenges and plans for 2013? One of the biggest challenges is to keep on moving forward with the same speed. This is more difficult as you might think because a growing community and a growing user-base can slow you down if you do it wrong. Another important thing for next year is that we have to focus more on stability and quality. But we also have to develop innovative new features so that we can lead the market instead of just copying the features of proprietary competitors as other free software projects do. The IT, PC and cloud market is moving fast forward and standing still means loosing.

I think ownCloud is a very welcoming community so if you want to participate then join our mailinglist, IRC channel or help to improve ownCloud or write a 3rd party app for it.


Thanks to everybody who contributed. Let's make a difference together.

The User Data Manifesto

This blog post is about an initiative that I just announced during the Latinoware 2012 keynote here in beautiful Brazil.
As you probably know I care a lot about user data, privacy, cloud and Internet services.

I initiated the open collaboration services standard to build a decentralized social network in 2008 way before it was hip to do it and before Diaspora or tent.io emerged. OCS is not federated as newer protocols but it is distributed, open and not centralized. OCS is used in several free software projects like KDE, MeeGo/Mer, Midgard and others.
In 2010 I started the Bretzn project that tries to build an App Store infrastructure for Linux Application that is not bound to a central server as the ones from Apple, Google, Microsoft or someone else. Everybody can run an own App Store node and contribute to the distributed ecosystem. The Appstream project does also use the Bretzn ideas and OCS to access decentralized data. Gratulations to the first release last week by the way. The idea is that the users don´t have a lock-in effect to one central App Store server.
And 2.5 years ago I started ownCloud that enables users to run an own cloud storage service comparable to Dropbox, Google Drive or Skydrive, but hosted on an own server.

The goal of these ideas was always to give the users the control over the own data back and to avoid centralized data silos.
There is always the feeling in the air that decentralized and federated is good and it is important that users are in control of their own data. But what does this actually mean? What does controlling data imply?
Try to explain this concept to a random person why it is better to post messages to Diaspora instead of Facebook and you quickly realize how difficult this is and how big the disconnect to users really is.


After a lot of discussion with people from several different projects I realized that it is probably a good idea to write a few principle about user data rights down. And I wanted to approach it, not from a technical point of view but to describe the fundamental rights that every user should have.

After over one year of discussions and a lot of iteration we have now the user data manifesto. It describes fundamental right that every user has in the Internet age regarding own data.

It is interesting. In the offline world there is a well established understanding what is wrong and what is right regarding own belongings but in the digital, cloud world the corresponding rights are totally unclear for most people.

A few examples:

• You send your vacation pictures to your friends and family as printouts by conventional mail. It would be totally unacceptable if the post office would look at your pictures and decide to sell it to picture agencies. But exactly this happens in the digital world.

• It would be unacceptable if people from the government and private companies would come into your house and search your documents and belonging without evidence several times a day. But exactly this happens in the cloud age and people seem to accept it.

• It would be unacceptable if your documents and belongings are stored on an unknown location and you don´t know and can't control which international laws apply to it.

When Richard Stallman wrote the free software definition and stated the 4 freedoms in 1986 it was implicitly clear that you control your data if you control the hardware that is sitting under your desk and you control the software because it is free software. But nowadays it is a bit more complex. Even if Google, Facebook and other would release their software under the GPL license then this wouldn´t give the users control over their data. So a next step is needed that defines freedoms and rights that users have over their data and not just over their software.

Because of that we have the "user data manifesto" now.
http://userdatamanifesto.org

We already have a short list of services and software that follow these principles
Please contact me if you are aware of other software projects or services that respect this user rights so that we can add them to the list. You can also signup with your name on the website to express your support.
Let´s spread the word and hope that users understand and protect their right better in the future.


Frank

Worldwide ownCloud Developer Meeting in October

I guess we've grown too big for our britches :-)

Instead of having our next developers meeting in my offices in Stuttgart, we

have accepted the very kind invitation of KDAB and will be hosting the

European edition in Berlin -- but there's more. By popular demand, we will

also have a simultaneous sprint in Ann Arbor in the US together with a partner.

Mark your calendar, the weekend of October 27 and 28, across two

continents.

We encourage all who want to participate and to learn more about the

ownCloud project to reach out to me for Berlin or Michael Gapczynski

for Ann Arbor and put your name into the Doodle here:

http://doodle.com/aqrd4rg64hzaidxv

We'd especially like to encourage folks from openSUSE, KDE, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora,

Debian and others to participate so we can improve integration and

create even better performance for our mutual users.

We also have a budget for travel and accommodation sponsorship. Please send me a mail

if you are interested.

Last developer sprint attracted 18 participants to Stuttgart and attendees

were integral not just in coding and bug fixing, but more importantly in

helping map out the strategic direction of the project. We had a great time

putting in long hours, drinking beer and barbecuing bratwurst.

If you think you can help, we'd love to have you. 

Frank

New software day

Today we launched the ownCloud 4.0.4 bugfix release and the second version
of ownCloud Business and Enterprise. The ownCloud 4.0 community release a few
weeks ago  brought cool new features like versioning, external filesystems or
encryption but, frankly, was a little rougher than we expected. It seems that
we follow the KDE tradition here where KDE 4.0. was also not the most polished
release ever. ;-)

The good news is that the releases today smooth those rough edges and we can
recommend ownCloud 4 now for full production use -- bringing the ownCloud 4
features to our enterprise customers and service providers.

We also have new version of the Linux/Win/Mac Desktop Syncing Client available
developed mainly by Klaas. The Client is a Qt application and integrates nicely
into KDE. We also have a new version of the Android App available which is based on the
community code developed by Bartek


The downloads are here:
https://owncloud.com/download
http://owncloud.org/Changelog

Everything is available under AGPL and GPL of course.

So what´s coming up:

I recommend that you attend Klaas BoF session at Akademy
(http://dragotin.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/owncloud-bof-at-akademy-2012/) if
you are interested in deep KDE / ownCloud integration. There is a lot of
potential for ownCloud and KDE to work very closely together in the future.
I believe that an integrated free software offering is significantly better
than an isolated Linux Desktop or an isolated Cloud service. I can´t make it
to Akademy unfortunately.

As you know, ownCloud is committed to a 3-4 month release cycle -- which
means no rest for the wicked. We are working full steam on new things for
ownCloud 5 coming in late summer, including:

• An improved encryption system that is useful in more scenarios than the current encryption
• Improved handling of big file uploads
• Improved permission system for sharing
• And lots of other improvements like RSS feed sharing with KDE Akregator or server to server sharing.

I´m so happy to work on a piece of software that receives so much positive
attention from the free software world, developers and free web activists --
but also companies and customers. And all this is only possible because we
have an awesome community of contributors. It is their active participation
and creativity that makes ownCloud possible. So I say thank you to all!!!!!

ownCloud 4 released

Today the ownCloud community released ownCloud 4. This is an important milestone for us as a community, for the product and for our code base.

So what are the new features?

• File Encryption
• File Versioning
• Mounting of external Filesystems (experimental)
• TODOs App
• Drag & Drop File Uploading
• Shared Calendars
• Calendar categories
• Hugely improved contacts app including groups
• Improved WebDAV, CalDAV, CardDAV compatibility 
• Movable Apps
• Improved External App
• Improved Sharing of Files
• Overall Performance Improvements
• System/User Exporting/Importing
• User/Groups support via LDAP/AD
• Viewer for ODF Files
• Improved Photo Gallery
• Improved installation of 3rd Party Apps
• Logging via syslog
• New public API for App developers
• Lots of bug fixes, smaller enhancements and UX improvements.

Isn´t this impressive for only 4 month of development?

Please check our nice feature page for more information.



This comes now only 4 month after the ownCloud 3 release early this year. We will switch back to a 3 month release cylce so you can expect ownCloud 5 at the end of August.

Even stronger KDE integration will be one of the focus areas of the next release. Currently we have the Desktop Sync Client, the Rekonq bookmark syncing, the OCS key value storage for all applications, desktop push notifications and more. Part of the next release will be deeper Dolphin integration, Akregator RSS feed syncing and KWallet integration for the Desktop Syncing Client. Looking forward to this cool Desktop/Cloud features.


Thanks to everybody who contributed and made this awesome release possible.
The core team, all the contributors, marketing people, designers, UX experts and of course all the testers and translators.

See the offical release announcement here and more information including the download on the homepage.

There are already packages for most distributions available on the Open Build Service.


I hope to see you all at our LinuxTag booth for hugs and chatting.


Frank