14 DAY TRIAL // The Nextcloud development team announced today the release and immediate availability of the Beta build of the project's next major milestone, Nextcloud 12.
A lot of goodies are about to hit Nextcloud 12 in the coming weeks, but those who can't wait until then to get their hands on the cool new features implemented so far can fetch the Beta milestone right now from the usual places and discover that it introduces push notifications that notify you instantly of shares, comments, calls, etc.. Client support should also be available in the final release.
To bring its collaboration features to a whole new level, Nextcloud 12 allows you to share entire folders or single files via email to multiple users, as well as set permissions individually. It also promises to let you create and manage groups through the Circles app, with which you'll be able to share stuff, and there's now a guest account implemented, along with the ability to impersonate users, for admins.
"This release is about bringing private, secure file sync and share to a next level by integrating collaboration and communication features," said Frank Karlitschek, Nextcloud CEO. "When you receive a shared file, you need context: why was this shared? What should I do now? You want to get to work, edit the file, talk to whoever shared it and so on. These are features Nextcloud 12 Beta provides!"
Writable public links, a more matured Spreed-based audio/video chat
The Spreed-based audio/video chat feature of Nextcloud was also improved in this major update with several goodies like screen sharing apps for both Mozilla Firefox and Gooogle Chrome web browsers, and it looks like the downloadActivty component was updated to let you track when files are being downloaded from a public share, and an expiration date can now be set for internal shares.
A menu was introduced in Nextcloud 12 Beta to allow users to click a user's avatar if you want to make a video call, a text chat, or send an email. Additionally, there's now a new Contacts menu located next to your avatar's top-right side, making it easier to access all of your contacts and use the actions implemented by the former menu.
Public links to files can now be made writable, allowing for collaborative document editing sessions on Collabora Online with people who don't have an account on your Nextcloud server, new authentication mechanisms were added for both server and clients, which now support SAML, OAuth, and 2FA authentications, and Nextcloud 12 Beta adds signed upgrades and rate limiting functionality.
A large amount of bugs reported by users from previous Nextcloud releases were addressed in this major update, which also comes with an extra layer of under-the-hood performance improvements for system administrators who want to integrate the self-hosting cloud server in their enterprise infrastructure. Check out the attached screenshot gallery and video to see some of these features in action.
