This build features push notification, writable shared links

May 22, 2017 11:10 GMT  ·  By

Nextcloud informs Softpedia today about the official availability of the final release of Nextcloud 12, a major milestone of the self-hosting cloud server technology that introduces numerous new features and improvements.

The biggest new feature of the Nextcloud 12 release appears to be the introduction of a new architecture for massive scalability, called Global Scale, which is a next-generation open-source technology for syncing and sharing files. Global Scale increases scalability from tens of thousands of users to hundreds of millions on a single instance, while helping universities and other institutions significantly reduce the costs of their existing large installations.

"With Global Scale, Nextcloud moves the goal posts for efficient, highly scalable and easy to deploy and extend enterprise file sync and share solutions" said Frank Karlitschek, Managing Director at Nextcloud GmbH. "By automatically moving user data between nodes to achieve an optimal balance between legal requirements, costs and Quality of Service, GS removes traditional, costly scalability limitations like data center uplink, load balancers and database, storage and cache."

Push notifications, many improvements

Nextcloud 12 also introduces push notifications to instantly notify users of shares, calls or comments, the ability to share single files or entire folders via email to multiple users, support for setting permissions individually, create and manage groups through the Circles app, the implementation of a guest account, the ability to impersonate users for admins, and support for screen sharing apps to the Spreed-based audio/video chat feature.

Additionally, Nextcloud 12 updates the downloadActivty component to let you track when files are being downloaded from a public share, allows users to set an expiration date for internal shares, and a new menu lets you click a user's avatar to quickly make video calls, text chats, or send emails. To make it easier to access your contacts, there's now a new Contacts menu next to your avatar's top-right side.

Nextcloud 12 also improves collaborative document editing sessions on Collabora Online with people who don't have a Nextcloud account on your server by allowing you to make public links to files writable, and implements a new authentication mechanism for both server and client to support SAML, 2FA, and OAuth authentications. Rate limiting and signed upgrades functionality is available as well in Nextcloud 12, which you can download right now.

Nextcloud 12 (2 Images)

Nextcloud 12 released
The Circles app
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