Introducing Nextcloud 21!
welcome to this special event today we launched the next big version of next cloud next.hub 21. it's crazy to remember that this is the fourth big product launch in only the last 12 months i made huge changes in the world the next community stayed focused on our goals and our mission providing the best and most advanced collaboration platform to as many people as possible and we do this in a completely decentralized way with open source respecting the privacy and security of our users this is completely different than what our competitors do with selling your data and trying to knock you into their clouds education is one of the critical topics at the moment copy 19 makes it even more important we need to have a future-proof secure and easy to use infrastructure only next door can provide that so let's look into the big improvements that we did in the last 12 months it all started one year ago with next.hub 18. it introduces the hub concept integrated office flow workspaces file logging and many many more things just a few months later we launched next load hub 19 with password-led authentication mail priority inbox with machine learning and next slot forms and just a few months ago in this fall we introduced next hub 20 with dashboard status features integrated search and many other things so before we dive into the product announcement that we have for you here today i think we should cover a little bit how we actually achieve our goals and for that i want to hand over to etsy this bumpy year has made it crystal clear exactly how digitally dependent we all really are not only to chat with friends but to get things done it has become really inconvenient not to rely on the internet to do basic things like call an ambulance register at hospital or buy medication regardless of the fact that half of the world is online our institutions and our common infrastructure like transport water energy healthcare have all become dependent and intertwined with the web private players are definitely part of providing common infrastructure however the interface between the public and the private sector need to be designed thoughtfully to make sure that strategic risk is brought to reasonable levels for all players involved and that they can enjoy digital sovereignty it is possible to digitalize without compromise there will be inevitably some central points these need to be identified and appropriate checks and balances need to be introduced to these critical inflection points the security of today goes well beyond keeping out rogue malicious actors towards creating a stable and peaceful interdependent system where every party's power depends on the other and therefore no one party can dominate this is not a win or loser model it is a winner-winner model although a global company the birthplace and geographic location of nexcloud is relevant europe has strategic leverage on a global level on the digital debate because of its strong and wealthy market i want to be crystal clear here about what i mean i'm certainly not saying that europe has some sort of moral high ground and i'm painfully aware of all the imperfections of europe as well as the equally impressive advances around the world the thing is is that european citizens are comfortable enough privileged enough to demand better this results in legislation around data protection and competition that gives a framework for multiple diverse players strong players to push for alternative solutions the financial model that drives next cloud means that dreams can become reality there is an alignment between the founding vision and the financial drivers which is apparent in examples like open source which are programmed into the fabric of of the the company rather than an afterthought next cloud have has proven itself the product is live for several years in fields that i care about like health and education it is not a concept or a hope it's practical so now let's talk about next load hub 21. it comes with a ton of improvements all over the place for example next cloud group there we improve next cloud made a lot with a lot of improvements usability performance functionality the same with next load deck our awesome project management tools which also got a lot of improvements all over the place but for this presentation today i want to concentrate on two main areas first is collaboration and second is performance now i want to hand over to young to tell us all about the collaboration improvements next down is all about collaboration these days it's more remote than in person and most of your listening probably work from home to help with what for a lot of you is a new way of working we have some really great improvements for more seamless collaboration next our talk is one of our biggest collaboration components it features chat voice calling and video conferencing including screen sharing and works with all your devices i'm happy to present to you what the team has been working on to make your life easier with conversation visibility it's super simple for people to join conversations relevant to them you can set a conversation as accessible to registered users like your colleagues on your company instance and optionally also to guest users if you have outside collaborators you can do this when creating a new conversation or later in the conversation settings others can then easily find the conversations via the search and join it conversation descriptions allow you to add further info to a conversation you can find this in the top of the right sidebar if you have some current announcement a recurring meeting or links to more info added there the new sent and read indicators show you if a message is sent to a server and if it is read a single check mark indicates that the message was sent to the server and double check marks that it has been read if you prefer more privacy or you just feel bad about leaving people on red this can of course be toggled off in the privacy settings if you are offering calls you will love the new push to talk or push to mute when your microphone is muted you can simply press and hold the spacebar to talk your microphone will be active only as long as you hold the space bar the other way around when your microphone is on and someone in the office or at home asks something or there's any loud noise you can press and hold the spacebar to mute and another helpful feature for calls is the ability to raise your hand when you want to say something simply go to your own controls and raise your hand from there this shows an icon next to your name so the moderators and other people notice you would like to talk this is very helpful for moderate discussions webinars and remote learning because these improvements are of course not all that we have for you in next slot 21 there are more nice new features across next cloud to ease collaboration document templates make it easier to get started being productive especially on recurring documents like meeting notes invoices and slides templates work with text documents as well as office documents spreadsheets and presentations we created some beautiful default templates for you and you can of course also use your own just put them in the templates folder next our text which you might know is our integrated collaborative editor if you haven't heard of it yet it supports markdown for formatting syncs with your files and enables live collaboration when you collaborate on a document it is now very easy to see who is working on which changes with the optional author colors you can simply toggle them from the participants menu in the top right additionally you can open the sidebar and discuss or even have a call right there without leaving the document let's walk through the improvements we introduce in next slot 21 beginning with next slot talk you can add descriptions to conversations to give them more context just go to the right sidebar and add further info there in the conversation settings you can make the conversation visible for colleagues as well as for guests so other people on the server can find it and join of course you can still simply share a link for the conversation so people who do not use nextcloud can join as well the lobby is useful when you organize an event with many participants like a webinar in the conversation messages now show if they have been read or not one checkmark indicates that the message was sent to check marks that it was read if you prefer not to share your red status you can of course disable this in the privacy settings during a meeting you can now use the space bar to temporarily mute or unmute yourself you can also raise your hand to get the attention of other participants that gives a quick idea of what is new in talk for next cloud 21 let's look at the collaboration improvements we did templates help you get started with documents spreadsheets or presentations we prepared some nice ones for common tasks like meeting notes invoices and slides if you don't know it yet this is next cloud text our collaborative text editor you can now enable author colors so you can easily track who wrote what in the templates folder you can simply edit templates or add your own this is how collaboration will get even easier with next cloud 21 but there is more let me now get to our biggest upcoming edition we are very happy to announce next cloud whiteboard this is a fully collaborative whiteboard inside of nextcloud you can see the curses of others draw lines and shapes write text add pictures and annotate together since the whiteboards are saved among the regular files you can collaborate however you want you can have a call in nextcloudtalk and work on a whiteboard with the participants and you can even share a link with people outside of your next cloud it's just as easy a presentation mode makes others follow your view so they are automatically focused on what you are talking about or noting down and of course we included two templates for the whiteboard as well to get you started one for swot analysis and an impact effort matrix we work together with the open source whiteboard software space deck to integrate all of this nicely into nextcloud we are very excited about nextcloud whiteboard and we look forward to see what you will do with it thanks a lot over to yours for another set of big improvements we have for you in next.21 for nexlar21 we wanted to do introduce an improvement that would benefit all of our users better performance so we profiled and optimized next round in the next few minutes i want to go through some of the most significant changes that we did so nexro is a very modular platform that means a lot of its features come in apps and on the page load these features have to be loaded from the apps and with more apps came longer loading so we reworked this code not skilled with the number of apps but always go equally quick after loading off the apps each of the apps have to load this translations and with hundreds of languages available for nexrad they started to take more and more time so we centralized the loading of translations which made it up to three times faster nextrod is also very nice theming support including the dark mouse that can follow your browser settings so we now no longer check and update the theming on every single page slot of course the fastest workers work you can completely avoid and this is double true for database requests we worked hard to eliminate several database requests that happen on every page load we also noticed that loading of the comments took a while for every file and folder there had to be two requests and we optimized this to only need a single database request for all the files in the folder as you can see in the graph here with more files this means a lot less requests compared to how it is in xlr20 now of course some requests are unavoidable but we still manage to make those ten percent faster so all in all this next flat release should significantly reduce the load on the database now for big servers we also introduce the change configurable update interval for device tokens these device tokens are used to check session activity users can see if their browser or their desktop client has been active and this is checked once every minute but on big servers this adds up so we allow the system administrator to reduce this load by 80 by decreasing it to one check for five minutes and next i want to talk about a couple of very specific improvements we made but first let's talk about php 8 which is supported by nexra 21. this
major new release introduces several improvements that can make the performance up to 10 faster so all these changes help every single nexon server out there and now we want to talk about a couple of specific areas where we made even bigger performance improvements like storage and user management so the text app is used a lot for collaboration with notes and a lot of customers say that their users have often multiple text files open in tabs and each of these text files introduces a constant load on the server by checking every now and then for changes we eliminated this by introducing idle mode after 30 minutes we also worked hard to decrease the impact of an extra session by over 25 percent so all in all the load for next text on the big server can be decreased by 50 or more and these large servers are often used in object storage we optimize the number of common operations so for example a copy operation is no longer going through a next. server which can increase the performance by up to 100 times for object storage we also introduce a setting to skip the bucket check and this can save of 12 milliseconds of every request to the storage we also optimized certificate handling which at one customer showed 15 better response time another customer saw that the trash can get pretty slow if you have a lot of files like tens of thousands or even millions and we optimize this to be more than twice as fast we also optimize user group handling maybe three times faster and there were many more improvements for example installation and updates up to twice as fast as some database optimizations updates to account like changing your username or not 10 times faster the app store page loads faster and many many more so all together next world cup 21 is a lot faster you just need to update to get all the benefits from this improved release as a system administrator means you can add more users to your server without having to upgrade the hardware and that's really good but we wanted to do more that is why we are introducing the high performance backend for files now let me explain a little bit what this does the nextrod is built on the most popular technologies on the web and this brings many benefits it is easy to deploy administrators know how to scale it up as you can see for example by how easy it is to build a cluster for tens or hundreds of thousands of users for next cloud it also enabled us to build global scale our innovative architecture that allows a single nexus to scale across continents to tens or even hundreds of millions of users but there are constantly new technologies emerging on the web and these new technologies bring new opportunities and we wanted to bring the best of both worlds to our users so we are introducing today an optional high performance backend for files and this backend is written in rust and allows permanent connections to a desktop client so what is the impact of this change well first of all for a user it means no more waiting normally the client would check every 30 seconds if files have changed on the server but with the permanent connection the client is immediately notified and can start syncing right away this also impacts notifications because they are also instant right now so when a file is changed or shared with you or when a notification is generated because somebody commented on a file or even an incoming call you will now right away from the desktop client so for an administrator there is also significant impact of this change so a client would check in almost 3 000 times per day with the server to see if there are any changes and we're reducing the interval of that from once every 30 seconds to once every five minutes we decrease the number of requests in the server by 90 now as a bonus we also introduce this for our web interface which also means instant notifications in the web interface and less load on the server at the event cloud three dozen educational and research institutes are using next flat and we did some measurements there in a 15-minute period 250 000 requests were made from clients to the server and this represented two-thirds of the network connections to their systems to hear what this change can mean let me introduce you to dr thomas hiltmann he is responsible for the cloud infrastructure of these three dozen universities and research institutes at tu burden hi i'm thomas edmond from tuberlin we are providing excel for about 24 000 users at our university and more than 30 other members of the dfn the german research network with about 40 000 users recording this you get about 400 000 requests at the last 15 minutes on our web front ends more than half of them are prop find requests from the clients if we could decrease these requests this would not only lower the load on our web front and also our network components like firewall and load balancers would be spared we are very excited about the upcoming release expecting performance improvements by decreasing requests and load which will allow us to scale up without having to purchase more hardware while giving the users a better experience well as you can hear from dr thomas hilman there's a big opportunity for improvement here and we look forward to see the results of our high performance back-end other customers and users so all in all nexon tab 21 is faster more scalable and more responsive for users that can mean up to twice faster loading of pages for administrators it can decrease the load on the server by up to six times let's go back to you frank so what is the summary next.21 brings significant improvements in all areas for example in groupware where we have complete new version of next.mail with a lot of new features and performance improvements we have a lot of new things in excel deck which is our project management tool we have significant improvements all around collaboration specifically next for talk we have a lot more functionality a lot more power what you can do and of course we have the performance improvements which our new high performance backend we really helps to make next load hub faster and also more scalable especially for very big installations so as always everything we do is open source and it's also available today so you can go to our website and download it and host it yourself so this is all what i wanted to share with you today so thanks a lot and have a great day you
2021-02-25 07:49
