Nextcloud Hub 19 Brings Passwordless Authentication, Collabora Online as Default Office App

Nextcloud Hub 19

Nextcloud GmbH announced today the general availability of Nextcloud Hub 19, a major release of their popular and open-source self-hosted on-premises collaboration platform.

With Nextcloud Hub 19, the file sharing and collaboration platform introduces much-needed features for people who are forced to work from home during the COVID-19 crisis, including passwordless authentication with support for security keys. This implementation not only makes Nextcloud logins painless, but also strengthens them through the use of hardware keys, and the first to be supported is Nitrokey.

New security measures are also in place to make it easier for administrators to secure the accounts of remote workers. These include password expiration features, password reuse limitations, automatic locking of account after multiple failed login attempts, as well as optional automatic logout.

Remote workers will now be able to find files faster with the myriad of improvements brought to the Nextcloud Hub user interface. These improvements make reading of files from an external FTP storage up to 5x faster, scanning of files up to 2.5x faster, thumbnail generation of images up to 25-50% faster, support for using “fseek” in an S3 storage, the ability of the NFS file storage to read data in larger chunks, ACL support for the SMB storage, and OpenStack Swift file streaming support.

Furthermore, if you’re working from home and you have a limited Internet connection, the Nextcloud Hub 19 release helps you stay connected with your team at all times by providing automatic scaling of call quality, along with other performance and scalability improvements and a new Grid View make all of your video chatting needs more reliable with integrated collaborative document editing.

COVID has accelerated a trend already visible in many businesses, forcing them to provide a secure remote collaboration solution to their employees. We named our release “home office” as it provides a large productivity boost for organizations employing many home office workers, like we do ourselves,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud GmbH.

Talking about collaborative document editing, Nextcloud Hub 19 is the first release to ship with the popular Collabora Online office suite based on LibreOffice out of the box. Collabora Productivity informed me today that their CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) is now an integrated component of Nextcloud Hub and the default office app.

Not only that, but installing Collabora Online in Nextcloud Hub is one click away. Collabora Productivity dramatically improved the installation of their LibreOffice-based cloud office suite with an innovative PHP proxy and a new custom protocol. As such, users will no longer have to configuring separate certificates, ports, or docker images to make Collabora Online work.

Nextcloud Hub is a really valuable solution for teams and home office users, packed with great features,” says Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “It is great to work together to make it much easier to deploy innovative, open source solutions that respect users’ privacy and freedom, and to delight our community and customers.”

Among other noteworthy features implemented in the Nextcloud Hub 19 release, there’s a new virtual Kanban board called Deck, which features support for calendars with todos and deadlines, as well as the ability to assign a group to the guest account to make it possible for guest users to collaborate with each other. Visit the official website if you want to try the latest features in Nextcloud Hub!

Last updated 4 years ago

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