 Okay, here we go, a bit of technical troubleshooting on the side of the screen. So, hello, you have just arrived. This is the future of our beta session by Frank Kalendic. Kalendic, yes. And so, Frank, there's not really much of an introduction with his involvement in the open source community for many years, just to briefly share that he's presented at many different conferences. He's been a member of the KDE community. And so, we're now focusing on the CEO of the next cloud based on journey. And Frank will really talk about the kind of data sharing and documents on the internet controlled by members. So, Frank, over to you. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. I said it before last few days, one of my favorite conferences. I really like the energy here and the interest in so many young people who like to learn about free software and open source and how to get involved. Really, it's one of my favorite places here. It's really good to be here. So, as I said, I was introduced. The topic is the future is our data. A little bit about me. I was already introduced. Frank, I'm from Germany as you can hear my strong accent. I'm involved in free software for a long time and KDE and other projects. And as mentioned before, I'm probably invited here as the founder of own cloud and the successor next cloud. So, one thing I noticed here at a conference and this is not a surprise. It is for a lot of conferences that one of the big topics is of course the cloud. So, the cloud can mean different things with different ways to see it and also like cloud can be like cloud infrastructure or I don't know, Docker is sometimes this means the cloud and different ways to see the cloud. When I talk about a cloud, I mean more from the user perspective that we have like services, services service that are run or used by many users like Gmail or Facebook or Dropbox and many others. And they are running their computer systems, obviously their software, their data, their infrastructure, running somewhere else and use them as a user. So, this is what I mean with cloud here. And this becomes more and more popular, of course, as we all know. But there are also people who are a little bit more skeptical. We think this is maybe not a hundred percent great trend. And if you ask them why is that, one of the main things they bring up is always like security and privacy. So, I collected a few studies over the last few months who covered this. So, here's an interesting study that the number one thing that holds people and companies and organizations, governments back of adopting the cloud is security. Here's another one. This is security and also vendor login. Vendor login, of course, as you know, is one of the big things. If you ever used like let's say over 365, then it's really basically impossible to move out again and do something else. I mean, you can migrate your files maybe, but all the metadata and all the other people that you interacted with, it's basically impossible. And the same is for Google Suite and for all these other applications. So, the vendor login is a really big problem. This is another graphic that I found. There is again like here security compliance is number one concern. Then you have network latency and then you have like migrate things around from in-house to on-premise to off-premise. So, lots of concerns again all about the security of things. And then we have very interesting topics like that one. This is interesting. We wrote a blog post here a few months ago because a lot of people think, especially in governments and in companies, we think that well, we use the cloud but we use a local cloud. So, we use something like something that's hosted like in our country or like close where we trust. Okay, this is like an Amazon data center or it's a Google data center or it's a Salesforce data center and this is running like locally in my country and this means it's safe. So, it's basically no one has access to it only like the local government and we have access to it. Well, the thing is there's actually a lot of discussion going on at the moment, especially in the US if this is actually the case. And there is a Supreme Court case pending which is like will be ruled the next few months if this is really true or not. And it's actually likely that they decide that the US law enforcement thinks they have access to everything worldwide. Even if it's not running on their own country, it's running somewhere else. If it's operated by a US company, so it's actually a service run by Amazon or by Google or by Dropbox or Microsoft or many others. But if it's basically run by a US company, then the US legislation think they have access to it even if it's hosted like in Singapore or somewhere else. And it's of course a big concern because then all this whole data protection laws they are basically questionable if they're really still valid or not. And now it becomes really interesting because this is all heating up. When I came here just like a few two hours ago, I saw some news. So actually like two hours ago Trump signed in a new law which basically gave like exactly what I just said, gave like US legislation full access to all the cloud data hosted somewhere else. And I just created this slide like two minutes ago here before my talk because it is news from this morning. So this is really, we have to understand that everything we store in the cloud is basically something that can be seen and analyzed and used by other people. We can't consider this to be private or secure or anything. And you also have the Facebook scandal of course where you can see what can happen with the public, with the data you put there. So this all becomes really interesting. On the other hand of course the cloud is very useful. We all like it. It's very convenient. You have your cell phones and you can share with others and you can synchronize data around and it's very handy. So for me and the rest of the next cloud community it was also always the question, can we combine somehow the benefit of this infrastructure that's running under our control and the cloud features. And this is actually what we want to do with next cloud. So next cloud is something where a project where you want to provide the same features and same functionality that you know from Office 365 and Google Suite and Dropbox and all the other services. But you can actually run it on your own infrastructure. And with your own infrastructure it doesn't have to be like a box at home. You can do this. It runs like a small Raspberry Pi if you want to. But you can also run it like in your company, at your university and your government. So really under control. Of course you shouldn't use something like Amazon or Google Cloud because then again as I said before someone else has access to it. But if you choose an infrastructure like a local service provider for example, which is by the way also good for the local industry here. Just go to a local service provider. Put your data there. Maybe install next cloud and you have your own little private secure cloud which has all the features in this very secure. So this is what we tried to build. Okay, so what exactly is that? So when I started with this whole idea eight years ago, there was no real name for it. At the time I called it open source Dropbox, which of course is a terrible way of describing what I'm doing if I compare myself to a competitor. But in the meantime Gartner came up with this term enterprise file sync and share. And this is basically the name of what it is. The idea is that if you have your files in the middle and you can access your files from iOS and Android and Mac, Windows, Linux and the web interface and Web Dove and so on. You can synchronize them online offline. You can share them with others. You have a web interface versioning encryption also and so on. Basically functionality you know from Dropbox and OneDrive and iCloud and all the other services. So this is what we are doing. This is the web interface. A bit hard to see. It's basically a file manager. It's not super exciting. You have your files in the middle. You're here. You can filter. You can search. You have sub directors can drag and drop and so on. We have desktop and mobile clients on the left. It's really hard to see. On the left you see our iOS client. It basically can manage your files. The same is available for Android of course. Looks exactly the same. On the right you have the desktop syncing client. This is a settings dialogue. You usually don't see it. It sits in the assist tray. Minimize and it synchronizes folders around. So you can say hey this folder here from my important work documents. I want to synchronize them to this server. I'm running at home. And this other folder I want to synchronize to my server that's run by my university for example. So it's really flexible. It's more powerful than the other competitors clients. Here you can see that we also have in the web interface have the sidebar here where you can also do comments and tagging and activities and versioning of files. So it's also a little bit more than just copying files around. You can really interact with other people who also have access to my files because I shared them with them. Every picture we synchronize. For example if you do auto upload from your mobile phone every picture you take can be uploaded to your next cloud instance. It automatically generates these photo galleries here where you can obviously see your photos. But interesting is here on the top you have the sharing dialogue. You can say sharing I want to share this photo gallery and then you can select people. You can select people from your own server that you interacted with or you can also search people and you can also find people on other servers. So we have a very sophisticated technology where you can actually find people on other instances via federated sharing and you can share with them. It's quite nice. And if you also if you find a person there's also this small menu here where you can say hey I want to chat with this person I want to email this person I want to a video call with this person but a little bit more about this later. Another thing you can do is collaborative editing because it's very very popular. So if you synchronize a Word document or Excel or PowerPoint OpenOffice or LibreOffice then you can share this document with others and if you both click on the file then you get this nice editor here where you then can edit your document together. So very similar to obviously 365 or Google Docs but completely open source and completely running on your own server. And the same is possible for Excel files. Here's a complicated Excel file with some calculations and diagrams and this is all working. Very powerful and the reason is that a full LibreOffice is running in the background. So we use a full LibreOffice on the server side to render this and this is very important to render like complex Microsoft Office documents and that's the reason it's fully compatible. We can do authentication, Active Directory, LDAP, SAML, OAuth, two-factor authentication with Google Authenticator or with SMS so it's very secure. We have this here which we call an App Store. It's not really a store because everything is open source and for free but it's a place where the community can publish extensions and we have over 100 of those extensions for all kinds of use cases. Here's like one where you can draw like diagrams in your next cloud you can arrange the menu and there's a markdown editor and many many more so it's very flexible plug-in system for all kinds of extensions. Now I want to talk a little bit more about some key features that are really interesting because what I showed you so far is also something that other software can do but what I have here is something that's very unique for next cloud. The first is a concept that we call a data access engine. So this means that if you have some storage somewhere else if you have a Dropbox account, a Google account, an FTP server, a SharePoint, a Samba Share, something you can all mount this into your next cloud if you want. It's very powerful in a company or in a university or in a government where you might have a Windows file server or a Samba server or a SharePoint server or an FTP or whatever already and you can basically mount this all together and use next cloud to aggregate your data to basically have one place where you have access to all your data and this becomes really powerful because we also have a full text search. You can then use next cloud to search your files over all data silos at the back end. Another thing we can do, we have very advanced groupware integrated nowadays so we have a full calendar and contacts and email integrated so this is a screenshot of the calendar, this is the web interface but you can also access it from Android and iOS and Linux and Windows of course we have an Outlook connector and a Thunderbird connector so it's a really fully working groupware here. This is the screenshot of the web interface of the email client and these are our plugins. As I said we are fully compatible with Outlook and Thunderbird and it works natively on iOS and Android and Linux and so on. Another interesting thing is a second Outlook plugin that we have for handling attachments that's very popular in companies where you open your Outlook and you want to send a big attachment to someone but you can't because the attachment is too big but if you have our plugin installed then you press send then the first thing that happens is this attachment is uploaded to your next cloud account a sharing link is generated put into the mail and then the mail is sent out so this is really popular. Another feature we have is the Federation concept which means if you have different next cloud servers let's say this is a next cloud server I'm running at home this is another next cloud server which is from a service provider here this is a university, another next cloud server is a company and there are different users connected to this different next cloud service we can still have shared folders between different servers. That's a very interesting concept. So I can have shared folders with everyone that don't have to be on my own machine. So it's a Federation which becomes this really interesting. Next concept I want to show you is global scale. So now I want to have to explain a little bit more what next cloud really is because next cloud is two things. First of all we are an open source community. We are really completely open self-governed open source community with according to our statistics over 500 people contributed to the last release so it's a really active community it's not really a theoretical community but really over 500 people will actively work on next cloud but there's also a next cloud company where we offer services for bigger organizations and companies and service providers and governments and universities who want to have support and branding and other things and these companies that come to us as a company and say hey can you help us running this next cloud instance. A next cloud runs as I mentioned before from very small it really runs on Raspberry Pi for two or three users not a problem but there are also organizations coming to us and say hey I want to run next cloud for 20 million users. So in fact the biggest installation we have at the moment is for 20 million users. So for 20 million users you don't really want to have them in one database and one storage even with a clustered application server setup it doesn't really scale that well. So if we introduce this global scale architecture which basically makes it possible that you can have a next cloud instance distributed over different hosting centers over different continents. So that's a really powerful concept especially because we can enforce data locality. You can say that the data of this user shouldn't leave this country or all documents that are tagged with this VIP tag or something should always be encrypted in this other data center. So it becomes really also powerful to enforce data protection laws. Next thing I want to mention is a feature that we launched earlier this year. This was the number one feature request since the very beginning of OnCloud and NextCloud can we please have clients at encryption or end-to-end encryption for sharing of files. And it actually took a few years to come up with the right idea how to do the key management and everything in the right way but we finally beginning of this year launched full end-to-end encrypted file sync and share also with sharing. So you can also share with other people and they're still end-to-end encrypted. Then another thing we launched earlier this year very exciting in my opinion is that file sync and share is nice. You can synchronize and share your files but if I share my files with someone and I can edit it together as I showed you earlier we also want to communicate. We also want to have a video call and a chat to discuss what we are doing with this document here together. And this is why we introduced a new product called NextCloud Talk and this audio video calling and chat and screen sharing. And the interesting thing here again this is again 100% open source and it's 100% self-hosted. So you can enable this small plug-in for your NextCloud server and then it basically turns your NextCloud server into a communication tool. It becomes like your own phone system in a way because we also have a SIP gateway where you can actually then call in have a conference call all running open source on your own server. And we have mobile apps, we have it here. Mobile apps for iOS and for Android native you can also like see all your contacts, click on them and then the phone of this other person rings. So a similar experience you know from FaceTime and Hangout and so on but it never goes through a central server. It always communicates, always goes through your local server. So this is in my opinion the only solutions at the moment which is 100% open source and federated and self-hosted and gives you the same experience than what you get with all this other fancy video and chat applications you have on your mobile nowadays. And of course you also have a web interface where you can have video calls and audio calls with other people. This is how the chat can be integrated into the actual web interface so if you have a shared folder and you want to work together with people on documenting this folder you can also have a chat channel here and this is XMPP compatible so you can also use your XMPP mobile chat to participate and chat with the people here and we also have a group chat which is very popular like a Slack competitor. Again, sorry if I'm repeating myself but it's the main thing it's open source and self-hosted running on your own server. So that's a full Slack competitor but running under your control. With your user accounts and your passwords and your code that you can audit and so on. Okay so how can I run all of that? People come to our website and say where can I register? Where can I create an account? Well you can't because we don't run anything. We only provide the software. We give you the software so that you can put the software somewhere and then have your own service. We don't run the service. We don't have any service. But how can I run it? Obviously it needs some kind of operating system. In the past we tried to support Windows. Windows on the server side which didn't work that well. I'm not a big fan of Windows servers. So nowadays we support Linux and BSDs. So everything that's Redhead, Suzu, Ubuntu, Debian or whatever it's totally fine. Databases, MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, Oracle that's also SQLite for very small installation or for testing if you want to but something like Postgres or MySQL, MariaDB is like recommended. There are Docker containers done by us and by the community which are totally preconfigured virtual machines for different operating systems. There's something in OpenShift, Kubernetes so it's a lot of different ways to deploy it however you want. It's really flexible. From a storage side we can use any kind of storage that exists on your server like an NFS mounted storage but also natively object stores like S3 and Swift. Again 100% open source which means that the server core is HGPL. The clients are GPL and this is also done by an active community as I said which is really important. I don't really like those open source projects that are open source but you can't really participate. The only thing you can do is you get a new tar file like once a year and then hey, here it is, this is open source. I'll show you technically this open source but I really like the community and the collaboration aspect of open source so this is also what we have here. If you want to run it in your company and your enterprise then you can do this too. You don't need to talk to us. It's downloaded, installed, use it and it has many advantages over other solutions. You can have a vendor login. You can just take it and use it forever. You don't have to pay anything. You have the right to change and distribute it. You have the security, you can audit it. You can participate in the community if you want and it has really clear licenses. So a lot of people say sometimes that hey, this whole GPL thing that is not really clear what it means to our companies is really secure. I still hear this from time to time. I heard it like a year ago from a big American bank who have a policy that they don't trust GPL somehow. I don't know. That's okay, then use something else. But for the rest of the world I think more and more people understand that GPL actually gives you nice security because if you don't use free software licenses like GPL and you use some license agreement from Oracle or SAP or something, well, this is really hard to understand what it actually means and that changes all the time. So your lawyers have a lot of work to do like reviewing all these terms of services and contracts and understand what it really means if it affects your business or not. GPL is actually very well understood and proven. So this gives you a lot of security. So how to get involved? Because we are an open source community. Everybody can contribute how to get involved. Everything we do is in the open on GitHub. So the source code is there. All the bugs, the feature request, the pull request, the open development, the roadmap planning, everything is there. And we don't have the different processes of the things that people who are paid to do next cloud, they're not special. They are all the same. So the process is always the same. You open a pull request and then everybody can do this, by the way. You don't need to have any special permission or something. You open a pull request with a change you propose. And then two other core people have to approve that. They have to say, yes, looks good. And this can be someone like doing full-time or another student from somewhere doesn't matter. But someone who is involved has to say, yes, looks good. And then all our automatic tests that we do, we do a lot of automatic tests and unit testing and acceptance testing and so on. They all have to be green. They all have to be successful. And if this is all good, then it's merged. So everybody can do this. So it's really possible to really get involved really easily. And you don't have to be like a hardcore coder. You can also do translations or design fixes or other things. So you have a lot of opportunities to get involved. And we do our conference once a year in Berlin. So if you want to come, you want to get involved. You also offer travel support. So we can help you getting there. We do hackathon several times a year. And we do lots of meet-up all over the place. I'm not sure if there's a meet-up in Singapore yet. There are several meet-ups all over the place. If there's no meet-up in Singapore yet, maybe, yeah, we should do one. So it is a good opportunity to get in contact with other people here. OK, so another summary from my perspective is something that is basically started as some kind of file server then moved into file swing and share. But nowadays it's a full collaboration software. So it's really about communicating and collaborating together and chatting and emailing and sharing calendars and sharing files and so on. So basically, yeah, it's a full collaboration suite. You can say that it is something like an alternative to Dropbox and to Google Suite and to Over365 with the main differences that is self-hosted, 100% open source and distributed and federated. So this is what we try to achieve as at the beginning of the talk I think it's really important to do this in a distributed and federated way so that we can all make sure that our data is stored in a safe way and we control the destiny of our digital future here. So thanks a lot. I don't know if there's still time for... Good, no need for Dropbox anymore. Any questions? Yes, over here, please. Thank you very much. Very interesting talk. So I have two questions. First of all, if I'm using Gmail for very long time what kind of user experience issues I will have? Let's say I get used to some Gmail features and lots of my Gmail and colleagues are a bit used to it. If I go to them and say, hey guys, there is next call they will think, oh yeah, but it doesn't have this and that. So is it really hard from a USUI perspective? Yeah, Gmail is... There you picked the toughest job here because that's of course a bit difficult because first of all with Gmail you have some kind of login because it's the email address, right? It's like the domain and you can't transfer this to another server so you will definitely lose your email address if you want to move from Gmail to something else using next cloud. That's the first challenge. Yeah, but I have my own domain. Oh, awesome, very good. Very good, yes, okay. You can do that, exactly. And then what you have to do is you have to have some kind of Linux server and all Linux distributions nowadays come with all the SMTP and IMAP mail servers that you need to fully replace Gmail and next cloud is then the front end for that. So next cloud, we don't have a... We're not really a full mail server. We are the front end top of a mail server which is not a problem because as I said many Linux distribution that comes with five different IMAP servers and whatever. And you can do this. I wouldn't claim that in the email area we have all the features of Gmail. So Gmail has all these extensions and things. We don't have everything here unfortunately yet but I mean all the basic stuff is working and we have encryption for example and support encrypted emails and other things but it's... I wouldn't say that we have all the features of Gmail yet but we are hopefully getting there. And then the second question is all after this one is how common is it for users of next cloud to cross the next cloud on the cloud? If you mean with public cloud something like AWS or Azure or something that's... A lot of people do it but it's not super common. Most go to a service provider like Linode or there's some others where you get like I don't know a little bit of resources for really little money and they're hosted there or they're hosted on some root server or if they get some space from the university or something like that. I don't think a lot of people actually deploy it on Amazon. You could, it's possible with one click but yeah it's not... If you do this then you can use something else anyways. There's not a lot of benefit. Yeah as you say next cloud has an encryption and it should be more problem to host it. That's true, that's true. Thank you very much. Thank you Frank for the presentation. You had one slide called the Federation so what I'm wondering is all these home clouds are connected but is there a user management over this cloud? So let's say user from next cloud A is that also available from another next cloud? Yeah this is complex and a lot of different options. So if you install the next cloud and use another next cloud then don't know each other obviously. There's no way, I mean you can share if you know the user ID of this other person so we use something called a federated sharing ID or the Federation ID which is username, ad host name so it looks similar to an email address. That's the username and an ad sign and then you have the URL of this other server and if you type this in the server sends a sharing request to the other server and hey that's this person wants to share and they can accept or not and then the connection is established but you have to know this ID similar as you have to know an email address. So this is the trivial version. Of course what we really want to have is a full auto-completion of users like you have with Facebook and Google and the others and you can achieve this in different ways. Option number one is you use a shared directory so if this all is run by the same organization or by an organization that trusts each other you can use the same LDAP or Active Directory and then you can auto-complete people on different servers. First option. Second option is we have a concept called trusted servers so if I as the admin of my server add your server as a trusted server and you do the same then our servers know each other and they trust each other and they can exchange address books which then means I can auto-complete people on your server and you users can also find my users on my server with auto-completion. The second option and third option is we have an optional component called a lookup server where you can host somewhere else and then people can decide to publish their identity on this lookup server and then be found by others. You can think about it as a GPG key server where you can do GPG without a key server you have to exchange your keys manually or you decide to publish your public identity on this central server and then other people can find you and this is sometimes used if you have a group of universities and they want to collaborate and then people can say yes I want to be found and by this username and by this picture and this email address or whatever click its publish and lookup server and others can find you with auto-complete then. Thank you and the second question which was new to me is actually the Thunderbird plugin so what is it able to do? Decide sending big files. Yeah there are actually two plugins first is like the sending of big files as you mentioned for the attachment and the second is the integration of the calendar and contacts. It's a quick question It's a bit of a silly question but I assume the migration from you should have a data on say and as your cloud you want to migrate your data without experiencing much downtime Is the migration in Turkey a menu is there a similar situation is that impossible? Migrating from where? From say a cloud service to the next cloud service. Okay. Like Dropbox or OneDrive or something. If your data in our case lots of data is on Amazon and there is a website that feeds the data from there so when you migrate you don't want much downtime. Yeah you have lots of different options I mean the good thing about this kind of services are there are many files so files you can just move over that's super easy. Challenges of course if you have shares with others you don't want to lose this shares with others who don't migrate at least not at the same time. That's a bit more tricky. A lot of organizations who do this kind of migrations they use this this data access engine concept that I showed earlier where you then can say look from now on access to let's say Dropbox is blocked in our company but you can actually mount your existing Dropbox into your next cloud as a sub folder and then you basically you use next cloud and you have your files and over time you can drag and drop move them over but you still have your old Dropbox account in there and you also have your Dropbox shares in this folder in your next cloud so this could be a migration step and a lot of people do it like that. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Great presentation. Thanks a lot.