Blog: ownCloud 5 released: a vision realized, a vision expanded

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Frank Karlitschek - 14. März 2013

Today we released ownCloud 5, a very important milestone for the ownCloud community and perhaps the most important release so far. But before going into the details I want to take a step back and look at what the original idea of ownCloud was at the beginning.

The idea of ownCloud was and is to enable everybody to host, control and sync and share their personal data without giving control away to the big data silos like Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive and iCloud. I think today we have all the features in place to say that we reached this goal. Everybody from a home user to a big enterprise can host their own personal cloud installation. I'm also super happy about the integration into KDE and GNOME because this is important to provide a really seamless experience for users.

It's a coincidence that CERN invited me to give a talk about ownCloud and data silos that I will give here in a few hours at the exact same day ownCloud 5 is released. CERN is also the place where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web 22 years ago. It's interesting that the Web was built as a completely decentralized system where no distinction between someone who is publishing data and someone who is consuming data exists. There is no concept of a centralized entity that everybody connects to. Everybody can be sender and receiver at the same time. Just as Berthold Brecht proposed in 1932.

Interestingly, the web looks a bit different today where a huge amount of the traffic goes through websites like Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Amazon. Where is the idea of a decentralized and federated web?

Today we are deciding how the world will look like in the future. We, the IT community, set the course of the train that is called "open society" now and we can decide into which station the train will roll into in 5-10 years. Is it the one where all the people still control their own data and information and can decide who has access to the personal files, photos, contacts, location data, chat messages and other personal information or will we live in a future where all the personal data of all the people in the world are stored on the servers of just a few big organizations and commercial interests, terms of services and secret services decide who has access to the digital life of everybody?

If you care about these questions then join the ownCloud community or other free software projects and work on decentralized and federated alternatives.

Quality

A lot of work to improve the quality of ownCloud went into the version 5. We launched a quality imitative during our developer meeting last fall. We introduced peer reviews for all commits that go into the core. We launched a new documentation system that has great new docs for users, administrators but also developers. We have improved application templates and sample code to help newcomers, we launched a new Jenkins-based continuous integration testing imitative with a lot of tests. We switched to a new and better bugtracker and provide daily builds of the server and the clients. This all
helped us to increase the quality of ownCloud 5 significantly.

Security

I'm so proud that we have a top notch security team at ownCloud. We have a state-of-the-art workflow when someone reports a security problem to us – including a responsible disclosure policy, publishing bugfix releases quickly and releasing advisories on our website. In ownCloud 5 we also added a few significant security enhancements including better CSRF checks, improved data sanitization and we disabled inline Javascript to prevent XSS bugs.

Performance

A lot of work went into ownCloud 5 to improve the overall performance. One of the key components is our filesystem cache and abstraction layer. This was completely rewritten to improve the performance significantly. Some tests show up to 500% faster performance compared with ownCloud 4.5. if you work with a lot of files or you have a server with a lot of users. We also looked into the overall database structure and optimized it for big installations. The sync protocol was also improved to reduce the roundtrips between the clients and the server to sync faster.

http://blog.karlitschek.de/2013/03/owncloud-5-released-vision-realized.html

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Alessandro Cosentino - Algorithms for the Kitchen.

Google Reader’s sunset is the dawn of ownCloud News

This post is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. Among all his contributions towards a more open Internet, Aaron was also one of the creator of RSS 1.0. Thanks, Aaron.

The first news of the day is that the fantastic ownCloud community has released ownCloud Server 5.0.0. Congratulations everyone!

The second news is that Google has decided to power down Google Reader. This is a sad news for the users of the Reader, but it’s a great opportunity for ownCloud! Google Reader will cease to exist on July 1st and their users are looking for alternatives. As you already know if you have been following this blog, in the last year I have been working on an RSS/Atom reader for ownCloud (News app).

The project started as a Summer of Code project sponsored by Google itself. Actually, the original idea and most of the design choices were inspired by Google Reader. It couldn’t be otherwise, since I have been a user of that service myself for long time.

We expect to release a stable version of it in less than two months (probably along with some ownCloud 5.X release). Once that will happen, I will write a post on how to migrate from Google Reader. Just to be clear, there is a big difference between ownCloud News and Google Reader.

OwnCloud News is open-source (code is released under AGPL) and you can host it on your own server. And if you use KDE, you will be able to use Akregator off-line and still have all your feeds on the cloud. Google Reader will be shut down on July 1st. You will have to make a change anyway, why not making a real change!

http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/blog/?p=479

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Frank Karlitschek - 15  Mar 2013

The new ownCloud 5 features!

Yesterday I blogged about the ownCloud 5 release in general and I promised to blog today about all the features that are new and improved in ownCloud 5

New design

In ownCloud 5, the main navigation was redesigned to clearly differentiate it from the in-app navigations. This also allows the app more room and thus a better focus on the content of your ownCloud directories. Settings and Log-out menus were combined into a user menu on the top right, which also shows the currently logged in user and makes it more intuitive to use. The settings are further simplified and app-specific settings are moved from personal settings into the relevant apps. To help people get their data synchronized, there is a new first run page linking the desktop & mobile apps as well as documentation how to sync contacts and calendars. This information is also displayed in the personal settings – and makes getting started with ownCloud much easier for a user.

Essentially, the new design helps to concentrate more on the content and makes it easier to navigate and setup the Desktop and Mobile syncing clients.

New Antivirus App

The new antivirus system scans uploaded files for viruses. The admin can choose if infected files should be deleted automatically and/or logged/reported in the log file.

New Files Undelete feature

Now users can undelete a file that was accidentally deleted through the web interface. Simply select the files in the files undelete section and they are returned to where they were deleted, with versions maintained.

New REST APIs

A new Open Collaboration Services (OCS)-based REST API is added to access and control ownCloud remotely. The newly released OCS 1.7 spec is supported. Main feature is a new capabilities API for closer communication with the Desktop and Mobile clients. It is now very easy for ownCloud apps to provide an REST API so more API features will be added in the future.

Display names

In the interface and share dialog, display names are shown instead of the login names. The display names are easier to understand for users and can be changed by the admin. The admin can configure the display names and they can be changed by the users themselves. The display names can also be fetched from an LDAP or AD server for bigger installations. This makes it much easier to work with ownCloud, as users are identified separately from their system-generated IDs

New search engine

A new Lucene-based full text search engine app is added. People can use the search to not only find files by name but also by content. Scanning is done in the background to ensure a responsive user experience for the users.

New photo gallery

ownCloud 5 contains an improved and rewritten photo gallery. It has an improved and streamlined user interface with a slideshow feature. Photo galleries can also be shared with others.

New documentation system

There is completely new user, admin and developer documentation. The user and administrator documentation is shipped with ownCloud and available in the help menu. The developer documentation is available online.

LDAP / AD enhancements

LDAP can now search in attributes, not only in the ownCloud username. The search attributes can be configured. Multiple User/Group bases can be configured in the LDAP backend. LDAP backend supports paged results for better performance if the server offers it (requires PHP 5.4) An LDAP/AD backup resp. replica host can be configured for HA environment. Multiple LDAP / AD servers can be configured.Enhanced external storage app

Increase performance of integrated secondary storage, including Dropbox, Swift, FTP, Google Docs, S3, WebDAV and external ownCloud servers, with a significantly faster, more efficient and easier external storage app. This is the fastest way to a personal hybrid cloud.

Improved Versioning

The versioning support for files is improved with an intelligent algorithm that automatically expires old versions if running out of space. The versioning keeps revisions every 2 seconds for the first 10 seconds, every 10 seconds for the next minute, every minute for the next hour, every hour for the next 24 hours and one revision per day until running out of space or quota.Expanded file cache
The file cache was rebuilt in ownCloud 4.5, and underwent a minor facelift in ownCloud 5.0 to improve speed, performance of external files, and scalability of sharing. The system is also a little faster with the new file cache, and less prone to corruption in production.

Improved apps management

The management of the shipped and the 3rd-party apps in ownCloud is improved. 3rd-party apps can be easily installed from the central apps repository (apps.owncloud.com) and are automatically removed from the server if disabled. If a new version of an 3rd party app is published by the author then an update button appears on the apps page inside ownCloud and he app can easily updated with just one click. More feedback is now given to the user during long running installation and updating operations. Recommended apps are shown in the apps list with a "recommended" label so that users can find high quality apps better.

Improved bookmarks

The user interface of the bookmarks app is improved and a lot easier to use.

Improved contacts

Contacts are now organized by groups (categories) instead of address books giving more intuitive access to Friends, Coworkers, Family etc. The main view shows an overview of the most relevant fields and the amount of info adjusts automatically depending the size of the browser window or device. The web UI is now written entirely in javascript giving a more responsive user experience.

Improved syncing

The desktop syncing clients and the mobile clients have improved communication with the server and can sync faster with lower server load.

Improved calendar

The calendar has now support for classed and the option to declare events as confidential or public. The sharing is improved and compatibility with clients also extended.

General fixes

In general, there were a number of bug fixes, UI enhancements, and improvements in performance.  Most notably a 5x improvement in disk write actions, as well as better overall scalability of ownCloud across the board.

Windows Server support extended

PDF viewer is updated for improved performance and compatibility

Improved media player

Improved overall performance

Improved download performance

Show file size and progress during downloading

http://blog.karlitschek.de/2013/03/the-new-owncloud-5-features.html