Nextcloud announced the Nextcloud Hub last Friday, with a galore of changes. Changes include workflow automation, a new mail client, a Google Docs-like online office client integration, and much more. You need to read the presser to get the whole list.
To me however, the most interesting upgrade so far with this change is the new major version of Calendar.
With this new version, you get two simple features that make a huge difference in what you can easily do with Nextcloud:
You can schedule a Nextcloud Talk session for your meeting,
à la, for example, Microsoft with the Skype for Business call scheduling, or Google Calendar with Hangouts (which they did ON by default the last time I checked, and which was very annoying).
This is great: Nextcloud Talk is by now a user friendly chatroom and direct chat solution, complete with audio/video call, Slack-like channel support, channel moderation, commands, @mentions, screen sharing, mobile app, file attachments, and deep integration with the “Drive” part of Nextcloud… really everything you would need. Integrating this with Calendar seamlessly is a welcome improvement.
And you can invite any email address,
even external ones, and recipients will receive an Accept/Decline email where they can accept or decline, even without an account on your Nextcloud instance. And, almost as importantly, they can join the Talk channel (call, video call, whatever) with their external identities. As Nextcloud doesn’t federate between instances yet, and frankly, it would be arrogant to expect others to use Nextcloud just because you do (of course evangelising is always nice), being able to use the chat/talk/video call functionality without the need of authentication is an absolute must, and also something that puts the usability of Nextcloud above the competition (as there’s no registration needed.)
So simple. So elegant.
I have yet to test the sound/video quality, but this is by far the nicest implementation of a simple chat/conf call solution I know. I almost want to start a new company just so I can use this in a business setting.
Now, granted,
the announcement was about Nextcloud 18 Nextcloud Hub 18, and I’m only trying these using my existing v17 instance. I am really curious about the office integration bit as well as the new photo gallery… so to be cont’d.