Originally published at: https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-2023-wrap-up/
Thank you for choosing Nextcloud. We look forward to serving you next year, wishing you all the best and hoping that it brings you joy, success, and endless possibilities with Nextcloud by your side. Our annual Wrap-Up is packed with exciting updates, insights, and behind-the-scenes stories that showcase the dedication and hard work of our team and community in 2023. Beep… boop… beep.
🤖 Nextcloud Assistant
Growing pace with Hub launching 4x 🚀
Hub 4
Hub 4 brings ethical AI to Nextcloud, introducing content generation features backed by pioneering open source AI models. Smart Picker arrives in multiple core apps, offering easy sharing of multiple items like files, cards, tables, locations, Collectives, and much more. It is also the first time the Tables app appears in Hub, along with Notes as a core app.
Hub 5
Hub 5 earns Nextcloud Hub the title of the 1st self-hosted AI-powered workspace with numerous features and AI models joining the stack. The ecosystem evolves: Tables receives elaborate formatting tools, chatting and conferencing in Talk is much more intuitive, and new integrations like Notion, Outlook and Teams become available.
Hub 6
With Hub 6, the whole platform advances towards a smarter collaboration suite. Nextcloud Assistant arrives in Hub, introducing a sleek AI interface and diverse in-app text processing tools. Multiple improvements in Talk, Dashboard, Groupware and other apps provide better focus and a healthier online working culture.
Hub 7
Finally, with our latest release, we make Hub even more interconnected and synergetic. Cross-app features like Unified Search and out-of-office message highlight this version’s focus on integrity, while user-focused platform-wide improvements and ongoing investment in AI augmentation further elevate Hub experience.
High-profile achievements
Cloud Computing Insider Award
For the 7th time in a row, we were nominated for a Cloud Computing Insider award. This year, we won Gold in the Cloud Content Management category.
European SFS Award
In 2023, Nextcloud’s founder Frank Karlitschek accepted the European SFS award in the Name of Nextcloud, its community and team.
European Award by Acteurs du Libre
Held at Open Source Experience Paris, the Acteurs du Libre award ceremony welcomed Nextcloud on stage to receive the European Award in collaboration with APELL.
Pioneering ethical AI 🧠
This year, Nextcloud has been committed to introducing and advancing AI capabilities in Hub, embracing transparency, choice and fair technologies. Ethical AI has become a highlight of 2023, with our efforts to help our users make informed decisions while having access to the best-in-class solutions. With dozens of AI integrations available in Nextcloud to this day, there are options matching everyone’s needs: remote or local, established or emerging, universal or leading in their niche.
Welcome Nextcloud Assistant
Nextcloud Assistant is a 100% open-source AI assistant that doesn’t prey on your data! It offers a friendly, native interface to an AI model of your choice, hosted locally or remotely. Use it in Mail to summarize threads, in Text to analyze and generate content, in Talk to augment your conversation, or anywhere in Hub via the toolbar to perform quick text related tasks.
Ethical AI Rating
With numerous AI models and services available in Nextcloud, we want you to to be aware of the risks you take. Our Ethical AI Rating, labeling apps based on code transparency, deployment model, and availability of training data, helps you build your AI stack with confidence.
Collaboration with the German government
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has made a bet on Nextcloud to foster digitization of the state affairs, including the AI strategy. In collaboration with the State Chancellery, we are developing a language model tailored to unique state administration tasks while keeping digital threats at bay. Announced with the Hub 7 release, the development of Nextcloud Assistant Context Chat is the first fruit borne from this collaboration. Read the full story to learn more.
A leap forward in global tech decentralization ✊
In our vision, data privacy and digital sovereignty don’t go well together with the Big Tech domination. Not only do we make software enjoyed by private users, government and businesses alike, but we also want to tip the scales in the global technological decentralization. In this regard, 2023 has been a success!
What made this year special:
Anti-trust coalition and Digital Markets Act
On behalf of the coalition of the independent European technology providers, Nextcloud has filed a collective anti-trust complaint with German authorities which spiked an investigation into Microsoft’s market domination. In September 2023, the Digital Markets Act went into effect, requiring Microsoft to revise its alleged market-distorting behavior by March 2024.
EU bets on Nextcloud to replace SharePoint
The impending end of support for the SharePoint Server leads to a growing need for alternatives. Government agencies in particular face concerns regarding data sovereignty and vendor lock-in, leaning towards on-premises collaboration tools. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) sets the standard for data protection with Nextcloud, being one of the most prominent examples of Nextcloud implementation in the European public sector.
Roundcube joins the Nextcloud family
Earlier this year, Nextcloud and Roundcube announced a merger bringing the open-source email giant under Nextcloud’s stewardship. “The merger not only underscores the collective strength of the open source community, but also highlights our enduring commitment to privacy, security, and user empowerment.” – underlines Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek. Read the story in our blog and join the discussion on the forum.
Moments that mattered: event recap 🗺️
34 events 🗓️
We attended 34 events around the world, exhibiting, speaking, and meeting our community: FOSDEM, Cloud Expo Europe, it-sa, GITEX Global, Smart City Expo, and many other key industry gatherings.
60 webinars 📺
From educating our users about new functionality and administration to the use of Nextcloud in various professional settings, this year’s streams covered a hefty number of practical topics with over 5500 sign-ups.
Nextcloud Conference 2023
On September 16th and 17th, we hosted the annual Nextcloud Conference under the motto “Trust, Transparency, Together.” Packed with insightful talks and panels, the event aired the announcement of Hub 6, Max Schrems’ EU-US data privacy keynote, Katrin Fritsch’s keynote on green internet, and Simon Phipps’ talk about the Fourth Sector.
Looking back at the marvelous time we spent together at MotionLab.Berlin, we invite you to read the Day 1 and Day 2 recaps. Session recordings are available on our YouTube playlist:
Nextcloud Enterprise Day
This year, we organized two events for Nextcloud enterprise community — Enterprise Day in Munich on June 13 and a special Enterprise Day France on December 5. Often held bi-annually, Nextcloud Enterprise Day helps us understand the needs of the business and government markets, setting the right course for feature development and integration. If you wish to participate next year, stay tuned for the announcement!
Incredible team growth 🌍
We are now over 100 team members spanning 20 countries, all working remotely or in our offices in Berlin and Stuttgart. With a third of them joining us in 2023, we witnessed an impressive team growth!
Notably, eight team members are working students who joined Nextcloud to start their career early in the software industry, gaining valuable experience and knowledge alongside their studies.
Welcoming talent from all walks of life, Nextcloud is dedicated to seeking bright minds all across the globe. This year, team members from six new locations joined us: Cameroon, Finland, Georgia, Hungary, India, and Wales (UK).
A thriving community 🧬
All of the above would not be possible without a healthy, thriving community of contributors behind Nextcloud. In 2023, we have seen many lines of code weaving the world’s leading open-source collaboration platform.
25k+ GitHub commits 🧑💻
Done by the Nextcloud team and community.
9k+ new forum members 🤓
+7.8k new topics and +36.6k new posts on the Nextcloud Community forum.
100+ security experts thanked 🩺
With 100+ reports resolved this year, our Security team demonstrated an incredibly swift response time: 2 hours on average.
76 new app uploads 🧩
Numerous new integrations submitted, ready to use in Nextcloud.
New developer program
This year, we welcomed the new Developer Program that offers you free promotion and opens a new window of possibilities for growth.! Now you have the opportunity to build apps in any language for tens of millions of Nextcloud users worldwide. What’s more, all core apps are now fully documented with OpenAPI by OCS (Open Collaboration Services). Make use of our documentation and examples to build an app that may just become the next #1 tool of choice!
And, of course, we announced it at our conference and advanced the state of technology with Nextcloud Hub 7: you can now build Nextcloud apps in your favorite programming language! No longer is PHP the only option, but Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, Java – bring it on!
Last but not least — welcome a fully redesigned app store and the new app ecosystem offering a better UI as well as smoother downloads and installation.
Content that you liked the most 💌
This year, we wrote 126 blogs, published over 90 videos, aired 3 successful podcasts, and created 13 community newsletters — all with the biggest engagement yet.
Top reads of the year
- How to install Nextcloud All-in-One on Linux
- How to install Nextcloud All-in-One on Windows 10 and 11
- Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating
- Open-source e-mail pioneer Roundcube joins the Nextcloud family
- How to install Nextcloud Office
Plug in: Nextcloud podcast
- How Nextcloud’s Design Team and Community Work Together
- All about the NextcloudPi Project
- Privacy and Surveillance law with Max Schrems
Most watched: Developer tutorials
Among multiple How-Tos, presentations, and feature updates, there’s a particular category of videos that stands out.
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Nextcloud on field: case studies 📰
Archdiocese of Cologne: More than 4,400 users collaborate on Nextcloud Hub
Learn how the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany enables collaboration for more than 4,400 users with Nextcloud Hub
Sorbonne University implements on-premise solution with Nextcloud
Learn how the University was able to achieve digital sovereignty over their data and user accounts.
The Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration
Discover how the Republic of Serbia deploys Nextcloud for compliant, on-premises collaboration in this case study!
Growing connectivity: new integrations 🧩
To our partners and customers 💙
Nextcloud GmbH is set to exceed its growth goals this year with already over 60% higher bookings compared to 2022, adding hundreds of new Enterprise customers and partners. We are deeply grateful for the trust you’ve shown us and we will continue to prove you made the right choice.
Have fun in 2024! 🥳
Every year is a new challenge, yet the world keeps spinning and we remain a team of people who believe in the greater good. That’s why we built Nextcloud, a mighty open-source collaboration engine set to put you back in control over your data and make your working life comfortable. Thank you all, and cheers to all the great things that await us in 2024! 😍