Nextcloud Marks 10 Years With Hub 26 Spring, Euro‑Office, and Expanded AI

With Collabora, Euro‑Office, and EU‑ready AI, Hub 26 Spring doubles down on documents, control, and sovereignty.

Yesterday Nextcloud released Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring, the latest and greatest version of the company’s eponymous cloud platform.

This event comes pre-loaded with several reasons to celebrate, especially given that the release arrives only a week after Nextcloud’s 10th birthday, a fact that CEO and co-founder Frank Karlitschek was quick to point out in a statement.

“In 2016, Big Tech dominated collaboration software and privacy was an afterthought,” he said. “Nextcloud was our answer to that. Ten years on, it has become the world’s leading privacy-first collaboration platform.”

There’s a lot to celebrate with this release. Mixed in with the release’s many improvements and new features is the unveiling of a production-ready version of Euro-Office Online, the fork of OnlyOffice that was announced just two months ago.

That means users of Nextcloud Hub 26 Spring not only have an alternative to proprietary offerings such as Google Docs and Microsoft 365, but they have an alternative to their alternative, since Nextcloud Office now features both Collabora Online and Euro-Office. That’s two open source office suites in one open source cloud platform. As Jackie Gleason used to say, “How sweet it is!”

For full disclosure: Nextcloud has been a FOSS Force sponsor for about a year; we’ve been covering the company since its fork from ownCloud 10 years ago.

Nextcloud Hub at a Glance

When Nextcloud got started, it basically provided a way for people and companies to store files in the cloud, sort of a DIY version of Dropbox. That remains a part of Nextcloud, but that’s just a drop of what it has become. These days, enterprises use it as a portal, a place for employees and partners to collaborate in numerous ways, as well as interact with customers.

Although some tech savvy families use Nextcloud to set up family portals, it’s mainly a commercial platform. Large enterprises with their own IT teams like it because it’s simple to master and they can host it themselves to keep their data safely on-premises. Smaller companies without IT pros on hand can use it through one of the many hosting companies that offer it as SaaS.

What’s New — Hitting the High Points

New features have been added throughout this release, but there are a couple areas where they stand out:

• Governance: Although Nextcloud already ships with a number of compliance tools, the new Governance hub is notable because it includes a variety of additional tools in a single location. Nextcloud says that the section is aimed at large government organizations, and contains features that cover a variety of scenarios that government agencies — or maybe even large companies with complex legal requirements — might face.

  One aspect that we were shown in a demonstration was Sensitivity Labels for fine-grained control of access rights. Also included is a Compliance Manager, which measures an organization’s progress in completing actions needed to reduce data risks.

• Application Switcher: From where I sit, this appears to be the biggest added feature to Nextcloud Files, and I’m sure it’ll be welcomed by nearly all users. It’s a bit late to the game — similar functionality is already available on other platforms — but Nextcloud’s implementation is excellent, and includes an easy to reach search bar.
• Delegation: A new addition to Nextcloud Groupware, Delegation works with both Nextcloud’s Mail and Calendar apps as a way for one user to send mail or manage a calendar for another user. This one comes with built-in transparency, so that the person receiving the email knows that it was sent on behalf of someone else — which is good cover in case of an oops.

Those are just the high spots. Bubbling beneath the surface: Nextcloud Talk can now be started cold from anywhere within Nextcloud, ADA (or Accelerated Direct Access) now gives access to search throughout Nextcloud, JMAP is now a supported email standard, and more.

Why Two Office Suites?

With this version, Nextcloud ships with two office productivity suites — Collabora Online and Euro-Office Online — which reside side-by-side in Nextcloud Office.

Collabora has long been Nextcloud’s go-to for online office use. It’s based on LibreOffice, a widely used open source replacement for proprietary office suites such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs. It’s known for its finely-tuned implementation of the Open Document Format, which is an open standard format for word processing and spreadsheet documents.

Euro-Office is a fork of OnlyOffice, which is primarily known for its excellent rendering of OOXML, Microsoft’s Office format, which makes it easy to exchange documents with Office 365 and the like. It’s released under an open source license — the AGPL — but with restrictions that make it incompatible with even some of its own licensing terms.

The fork is backed by a coalition of European tech companies and organizations which includes Nextcloud, largely in order to address the licensing problems (the restrictions have been removed) and digital sovereignty issues around ownership. Even though OnlyOffice is officially developed in Latvia, an EU nation, its owners have close ties to Russia, which has raised concerns about using it as a way of maintaining digital sovereignty.

Both suites bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the table, with much of the interest in Euro-Office centering around its ability to faithfully render and create documents coming from or to those using Microsoft software, which is likely when doing business with US-based companies.

Nextcloud Assistant Is Expanding

Assistant is Nextcloud’s built-in AI implementation. It includes the platform’s own in-house LMs that are always at the ready to supply assistance. Also included is the ability for users to install their own favorite AI brands — frontier or otherwise.

Nextcloud was one of the first DIY cloud platforms to add AI, and in Hub 26 Spring, its capabilities and uses have been expanded. It also ships ready for the EU’s AI Act, which is to be expected, as Nextcloud is committed to supporting EU digital sovereignty efforts.

Notable changes include making Assistant movable: With this release, when you invoke Assistant while working, you can drag it out of the way if needed, allowing you to continue working while you, say, copy and paste something from Assistant. New AI agents have also been added, meaning there are more things Assistant can do for you, such as populating forms.

Wanna Kick the Tires

If Nextcloud looks like it might scratch an itch for you — whether at home, in the office, or to run your company — it’s easy to take for a spin and kick the tires.

Businesses wanting to evaluate Nextcloud can sign-up for a one-hour test drive, which will give you complete access to a Nextcloud installation, complete with its core applications.

For home users, your best way to go would be to sign up for a free hosted version with one of Nextcloud’s partners, which saves you the trouble of having to set up your own server. If you’re adventurous and want to download Nextcloud and install it on your own server, however, you can do that too.

“Our stewardship has grown Nextcloud into an ecosystem, sustained by thousands, from teams at public sector organizations and businesses and technology partners to independent developers, collaborating under a common vision for privacy and control,” Karlitschek added in his statement. “This community is what makes Nextcloud genuinely different.”