 Yeah welcome back everyone. Hope you're having a nice lunch or you had a nice lunch so we're now back for a little panel discussing about the future of NextCloud and yeah we're happy to take all your questions so if you're in the virtual conference channel please ask your questions and I will try to get them here and I will try to answer them until roughly one when the next talk will come. So yeah let's start with the first one by Tim and I will just read it out. As NextCloud gets more and more feature rich along comes the risk that smaller web hostings and shared hostings will not be sufficient anymore even for small teams or families. Have you discussed anything like a private and enterprise edition or whatever you want to name it of NextCloud? So I think this is a good question for Frank you want to address that. Yeah that's something that question comes up from time to time so I know that from a textbook perspective if you read like I don't know books how to do products then usually you hear that you really should focus on one target group you should write software for home users or companies or individuals big groups small groups and so on it's a totally different that's of course a bit of a challenge that you really have to do like you work a few times and maybe you can only do something that works like for companies and at home users and with NextCloud we try to do something crazy I don't know but to actually have software that works from very very small to very very big from number of users but also from the use cases perspective that's a bit unusual but I think at a moment it's actually fine the classic thinking of enterprise software is usually that it's really like completely complicated you have all these buttons and yeah this has to be it's enterprise software and home user software is like usable and nice and pretty and has good design but I don't know maybe this is a thinking of the past maybe it's something it's possible to have software that really works like also for big installations small ones also from a performance from a hosting perspective I think this question was a little bit in this direction we still managed to have NextCloud so optimized and small and streamlined that it still runs on a Raspberry Pi on a small web host and also in a huge cluster for a few millions of users and it's a bit crazy I know but it's really the same software it really works from very small to very big there are some things that needs configuration so sometimes you maybe you should disable some apps that are just has I don't know special backend that is not really available on a Raspberry Pi or something but overall it's it's it's really it's really working and I think our strategy is to avoid this kind of I don't know community home user edition enterprise edition as much as possible as long as possible because it has so many problems I mean then I don't know you have to do work two times so it's really we really want to try to keep it together and so far it works I mean there are some things like the high performance backend which is really a that's a very heavy software component that you can't easily run it at home on a Raspberry Pi that's not possible but that's optional right you don't have to use it you can use next lot talk totally fine without it only if you have really hundred people in a in a video call then you need it and but still then we have this new service that we offered where you can get it hosted so I think we want to avoid having this end user and enterprise build edition as much as possible and so far it's working I don't know what do you think I think you explained it quite well I mean it's it's definitely like we want to keep it as one version also because just the workload and the the engineering load and the and all of it is just would just be I mean not necessarily doubled but it's just awesome more work to do it and it's it's confusing like which version do you then use and and the cool thing is that because of the scalability and all the other other services that you can hook into or the optimizations like you said the high-performance backend that just supercharges yeah next load itself I think that's a that's a really good solution and you can always configure it I mean sometimes people say oh I have so many features I don't really need all the features yeah then disable it what you don't need that's fine we have this plugin system the apps you can really disable everything you don't want and then you have your personal set of functionality that's good for you and that's works quite fine I think okay Tim hope that answered it if you have follow-up questions with that feel free to to write it I'm gonna go through some other questions first so one from Johannes here on the dashboard he says I'm not sure that I really like the new dashboard features recommended files what is that supposed to be who recommends this looks a bit like an ad billboard and most of its potential contents aren't really related to next load but to external third-party services if my perception is correct so yeah this is so it's definitely not an ad billboard because it's really catered to you so in the case specifically what you ask about recommended files it's maybe the naming is not like we maybe we can we can change that a bit but basically it's the files that are really relevant to you which means basically it shows things that were recently shared with you or that were recently edited where you actually actually have access to so it is actually the the same thing that we have in in files for some time now where it shows on the top the recommended files where you have these these few entries of files which are not in the root folder or whichever folder you're currently in but which are generally globally relevant now so it's it's at least the recommended files widget is that and the other widgets of course and of course Frank presented all these integrations and get up and get lab but all of these are personalized to you right so you sign in with your account and it's not like yeah not any advertisement or whatever an optional it's exactly it's optional the default experience is recommended files and talk mentions it's the males like important emails and upcoming events so it's the and even them you can disable it if you don't even those you can you can basically empty your whole dashboard or whatever where you can you can only show other people's statuses or only the events so it's definitely something that you yourself are in control of it's like nothing would show there that is unexpected or that is not relevant to you so one thing that is that is maybe that is definitely something that you have to try out yourself because if you see it with another person's data you you don't really get a sense of how it really looks like so yeah I really recommend to to upgrade to next lot 20 and check it out yourself because then you really get a feeling for it what will be shown yeah and if you really really totally hate the feature you can even disable the dashboard completely I mean of course it's not recommended because we think it is useful but if you really think there's not a single widget that's useful for you then you can disable it completely but we really think as Jan explained we there's really dashboard widgets that are useful I mean for example like upcoming calendar in events or if someone's mentioned you in a in a in a talk or the recommended files it's really like it's not it's not definitely no ads but this is all that actually there's not a single ad on the dashboard at all it's just recommended files are just files that you interacted with lately that we think that you probably want to keep like in touch with basically and if you don't like that disable it that should be easier and for example what I what I said in the in the keynote or in the demo is something that I really like about it but recommended file specifically is when we have a weekly company call I actually get the the notes the minutes file directly the meeting notes directly recommended there so it's the first entry there I can directly open it it's super simple very relevant or if you're maybe maybe you missed the meeting because you had another meeting and you you need to catch up this file will will then show up there yeah okay so we have a bunch of people who are excited about next lot 20 as an early Christmas present so I guess that's good and not a question but that's cool thank you use the Christmas too much as an example in the presentation oh yeah yeah so Simon asks will there be an engineering revision of next cloud I sometimes have the feeling that the awesome team you have together thank you is a bit too small to both deliver on many new features and at the same time to improve the architecture and the basis of next lot significantly there are a few high-profile issues open which haven't been tackled for a while for example Frank do you want to address yeah yeah so it's I think next load is a software that we really plan to I don't develop and keep around and improve like for many many more years like 10 years 20 years who knows and for software if you're coming from software engineering then there are a lot of things you need to do to maintain a software so there is like of course you want to have the features that are user-facing because we want to have good features otherwise people use I don't know Google or Dropbox we want to have the good functionality and by the way in our press releases and in our presentations we focus mainly on those user-facing features because they are interesting for the non-engineers out there but it's completely true that to keep software around there's also stuff you need to do like in the in the in the basement basically right in the frameworks and in the in the stuff you don't see there is like security stuff I mean you always need to update to the latest standards the latest hashing algorithms and the latest architectures to keep it secure same with scalability overall keeping up with the moving software world and we definitely do that we definitely do that actually with every single release so it's every single release I think you can go back with every single release we always talked about improvements like in the back end in here we even have a section where we improve the the way the notification system works where we use improve the way the previous system works the authentication system and many many other things so we do this all the time because if this is not maintained then it will I mean then everything falls apart after some point so I completely agree this needs to be done the only thing that's maybe different with next load compared to other software is that we have this very continuous development cycle so we have like three major releases a year and with every release we improve a little bit here little bit here little bit here so over time you have really big changes but we don't do like big rewrites or something because this is like dangerous and always goes wrong so we invest a lot in this maybe we don't we should talk about it more but yeah wish we invest a lot in the architecture and to keep it up to date otherwise it will not work in 10 years I don't know if this answers the question then if you I don't know what high-profile issues you mentioned we are constantly I mean if you see the development that happens in Githam we are constantly working on issues improving things with every release of course maybe it's possible that people have different opinions what's what's important you know an issue that's important for one person is not important for another so I don't know but if there's something where I really think this is really like critical I mean critical like data loss or security issue or something then like ping us here in the chat and maybe we can prioritize these issues higher but we're constantly working on that we're constantly improving things yeah I mean there will also be I mean of course this was the keynote right so so there's there's most of the like new things and the shiny stuff of course I mean also of course performance and architecture but maybe also the later talks will give you a better idea of the back end changes and all the fixes and stuff but yeah as Frank said like of course these things like the the stuff that should work anyway of course it's not usually being talked about so much anyway so this is maybe mostly a thing of the communication rather than a problem of actually doing it I mean for sure there will always be issues and yeah but also always remember that we're a big open source community so if anyone like actually wants to look into these things wants to fix something they're very welcome to and yeah we'd love to have you in the community so yeah hope that answers the question Simon if your follow-ups feel free to feel free to write so next question also by Tim saying talk is on a great path really impressive for better privacy and burnout prevention have you thought about a go offline button for the mobile apps like talk and sync so that you can enjoy your your fire and like your when you're done with work time off or vacation without colleagues contacting you so that's very good question Tim because this is exactly the idea of the do not disturb function in the new status features so basically in status you could then set for example fire and or on vacation and then you can set the the online status to do not disturb because that's gonna mute all the notifications automatically and so as we said in the in the keynote this is right now this is already in the iOS app and the Android app and the desktop app will also will also follow so yeah this I think is exactly basically what you're what you're asking for yeah also maybe add a bit I'm also presented that we have overall final control over notifications so we can if you if some kind of if some notifications really annoy you if you don't want to know I don't know you want to know if someone changes some file or doesn't want to know if someone mentions you in a chat I mean maybe I guess you should know that but I don't know you can touch the shit off you can really customize it you can really really try to build a system where you don't get spammed by useless notifications that's not that stuff definitely not idea okay next question by Biswajid is there any roadmap for next cloud in upcoming years so that's a very good question and as Frank already said in the first answer I mean we generally I mean we're an agile team right so we don't do roadmaps in terms of years right we do roadmaps in terms of next release maybe rough ideas for for the release after the next one but generally there's like no huge road my planning because stuff changes right competitors develop stuff situations change right like the whole COVID-19 situation completely change everything so you can't really what it makes you very very set in your ways to plan stuff so far yeah exactly yeah you always said everything so so there's few things to say I mean first of all there is actually a lot of planning going on on GitHub you can see look at the GitHub where we can see issues and projects and pull requests and lots of discussions you can have a look and you can see what's happening of course most of the stuff is relatively short-term so most of the features that are discussed there are probably developing the next few weeks or months not years we generally don't have a roadmap that's for a few years in the future because as Jan said it's I don't know I mean at least I can't predict the future so I don't it's really hard to say oh in three years we really need this feature this functionality it's really hard we we try to be more agile as Jan said and really like be more like yeah do more agile not like this huge gigantic projects which then will fail because things will change off in two years we realized that we forgot an aspect and that doesn't make sense or I don't know also remember that lots of next cloud is developed by the community and community I mean it's community I mean usually volunteers yeah like hopefully lots of you here in the stream already right you do lots of the features and I mean you do what you want and this is how it should be and because of that there is of course no plan so I mean we all have this shared direction where you want to go I mean we have our goals and values we want to like privacy minded and open source and but productive good usability good accessibility fast and so on so we I think everybody in extra community shares the same basic ideas but what to do exactly in what order this is a very dynamic process so long answer to no no there is no there is no secret five-year roadmap or something I mean maybe that at some point there will be a next cloud app for finding out the future so then we'll let you know so maybe we can we can do some shorter answers because we have a bunch more a bunch more questions so question by Beno when will next cloud mail finally be able to move mails between folders again I think this is actually something that is yeah in the new version if I think that's in the new version yeah I think that's Chris of can possibly clarify and yeah and then the next one Cyril asks is there a plan to improve next clouds experience on iOS unfortunately I have to use an iPhone at the moment and while I see quite a few Android next class related apps I don't find any on iOS except the files in the talk app so there as far as I know there's also a next-cloud news app on iOS and also next cloud notes up on iOS and there's some related ones which sync via web daf I think but yeah it's of course true that there's more more of an community on Android because I don't know Android it's just like has more market share and and maybe the open source minded people use more more Android but in general yeah we're trying to like for example I was in talk I mean the the apps which so to say come from from us the company like we do them the same on iOS and on Android so we make sure they're across the same across the platforms but yeah then of course community-wise I mean on iOS you need the developer account and stuff so that there's a few more barriers but yeah but there are a lot of actually maybe it's true everything of course what Jan said but maybe you should look at other third-party apps that either support web daf because they're actually quite some and lots of them I use some of them personally they work totally fine with next lot even if they're not next-cloud apps and not really have next load in the name but if they can load and save from web daf then I work fine with with next-cloud and because we have this integration into the into the iOS files app basically every application that can integrate with next load with the iOS files app can also then talk with next-cloud you can then load a file from next-cloud through that and save it back and then swing back so it's agree that there are not enough native next lot apps but you can they're actually quite some ways to work around it but yeah but hopefully more people will will join our developer community I for example know that our awesome iOS and development team they released an access library lately which actually was I think even there's so many things I can't mention everything in the keynote but actually I think the access library was completely redone now actually in the latest release so we have actually a basic framework for communicating with next load the only thing you need to do is build like the nice UI for whatever you do on top of it but although authentication and exchanging data and accessing the API and stuff is already there and you can use it so hopefully more people will write iOS app yeah and also actually with the with integration features that you also talked about in the keynote we do have a section in the app store which is called integration which also lists for example other apps like apps on Android apps on iOS so other like third-party apps so maybe you'll also find some some new things that you don't know yet in there okay next question from Dino and are there any improvements to photo management planned especially with regards to preview generation also asking about the Android app where photos cannot be viewed without having previous generated so I know that there's a preview generator app that you can that you can add you can enable which automatically or which pre-generates the previews so this of course you need to additionally enable so this is because there's some limitations I guess with the default default PHP installation I mean it's really I don't know that basically two ways to generate previews one is on demand and others pre-generate them and both options have their drawbacks right I mean the default is to generate them on demand but then basically can be slow on first access because then they're generated when you need them and then they're slow and then for a second time they're fast okay but first experience is slow or you use the generator app that Jan mentioned this can generate the previews like at night or at some point you can choose but then you don't have the previews until that time right if you already if you upload them and want to view them directly then they're not generated because they're only generated when this app generates them so it's a bit like we try to improve things and maybe we find a way to generate it on the fly efficiently maybe someone should do some research if they are I think at the moment we still use like the old image magic it's possible that there are other ways to which makes it faster I mean someone should maybe do some profiling and see if there are more efficient ways to generate previews but yeah overall if you have really like gigabytes files you want to preview them immediately super snappy on a slow machine I don't know open for awesome ideas how to do that sorry yeah sorry I was just looking through the questions and now I missed my where was so a question from Johannes an aspect I also didn't find addressed is what about data security when you don't have physical control over the server when it isn't in your own building but rented in some remote data center are there any ways to prevent unauthorized access apart from full disk encryption you want to address it yeah great question this is our end-to-end encryption feature so overall with security features it is always important to think about basically the attack vector basically how what do you want to protect against and most of next clouds 99% is done under the assumption that it is somehow your server or at least you trust the server because it is the server in your organization or your family or your soccer club or something and there's some trust in the server but if you're in a scenario where you don't trust the server because I don't know maybe you don't trust the host or you don't trust the admin or you under assumption that maybe the server is hacked then you can't trust the server but you still want to work with the server and that's a bit of a tricky attack vector but for that we have to enter end-to-end encryption feature where all the the data are encrypted on the clients the ios android mac windows and linux client and there's on the server there's always only the encrypted data and only the encrypted keys so there's no way you can change everything you want on the server you can be the biggest hacker ever you don't have all the information to get your data back but of course unfortunately the end-to-end encryption feature comes with some drawbacks there is no perfect solution for everything for example the web interface doesn't work anymore because the web interface can't like decrypt the data of course then you say well web interface JavaScript running on my side yeah sure but the code comes from the server so the code could be manipulated to do that so the web interface doesn't work sharing also doesn't really work at a moment could be improved a little bit in the future but there's some limitations stuff like search for example can't work right because in encrypted data you can't search the previews from the previous question there are no previews for encrypted files because they're generated on the server maybe your client can generate them that's okay but so it comes with limitations so basically using nexcloud in a scenario where your server is hostile basically to you that's tricky that's end-to-end encryption can help a bit but yeah that's tricky okay we have a very important question from Christoph actually he asks does pineapple belong on pizza and i think i can answer that uh with an anecdote are you sure it's the same answer than i give no i'm not sure you can weigh in so i am a friend of mine from italy he says he says that that well it is considered quite unholy but you can also not deny that it's really tasty oh a controversial answer i don't know if you want to add to that oh whatever you say you will be hated by some people right yeah yeah so i hope this it wasn't me who said that so i personally i don't know i i personally don't mind mind that ananas fruity but i have a big problem with other stuff like like i don't know spaghetti bolognese on the pizza cheese in the crust or or like whatever pizza which is that high or stuff like that let's maybe let's maybe step back from the holy wars and uh but ananas yeah so next next question actually back to back to next cloud uh so quest from stefan question about the hope this this helped clear up that question christoph um so question from stefan about the future of next cloud gmbh or next cloud the company how many people are working for you as in paid and how many are just contributing unpaid um so volunteers uh are you growing much through the support subscriptions and it would be interesting to hear some numbers and thanks for the awesome work thank you stefan yeah do you want to cool yeah sure um yeah so i mean um the the next company um this was a quite an adventure um when founded this four and a half years ago i mean jan and ten other people and me um and because we decided to found a new company a new product everything new and then also decided very beginning that everything we do should be open source so we couldn't use like the normal software licensing business so we already decided that we want to i don't know do it in a specific special way and then the question is of course will it work will companies pay for what we do and will they pay enough that we can then pay our salaries and then hire more people but now after four and a half years i really am i'm really happy you can believe me i'm really happy to say that this works um so we are growing a lot actually a lot i don't want to say too much about the numbers of this year but a lot and we can also hire more people we can do more events and more stuff so overall this is actually working we have around 50 people i think um fully paid in the company um and hopefully a lot more in the future and it looks like it at the moment um but this is like additionally to the community in the community the again with community i mainly mean unpaid volunteer community because we also consider as a part of the community but i mean the volunteers the volunteers are um hard to count um impossible actually if you look at the code contributions alone in github then you can see that there are over 2 000 people who contributed code over the time that's already a lot but it's only code there's a lot more contributions i mean like like there are over 90 translations 90 languages available they're not even counted i don't i don't even know how many people translating next lot a lot and people doing events and installations and like working around recommending next lot to your friends and family i also considered in part of next cloud they're all like part of the whole friends ecosystem and i don't know of the numbers but thousands thousands yeah yeah and thank you all for being part of it so yeah i mean everybody who is watching this video is definitely already part of it exactly exactly yeah and and all of us for sure also started in the community like even the people who work at next cloud gmbh at the company they all started in the in the community so so this is um yeah that's what makes it so cool awesome so um i don't know how much time we have because i think joss's talk is at three um should we should we do a few more questions or do you want to okay okay maybe one yeah maybe maybe one more um we have a question about training um from tim training for end users uh gets more and more of a thing people are just overwhelmed by all the features which are cool but a challenge um we provide trainings and q and a sessions for our staff colleagues and partner organizations but i guess it would be cooler to work together on that somehow so maybe you want to yeah super cool um we didn't have time so far um to do like lots of end user training um we yeah that's limited time and you have to do the software and do other things so we didn't do a lot of training as next lot um so far but if someone like you can help and we can work together that that's awesome of course there is a little bit of the hope that our software is so usable that you can figure it out on your own but i know that there are some limits yeah if you have any feedback let me know yeah i i it's pretty clear there are some areas where training is useful yeah and um yeah i have someone where we can do this together which would be super nice yeah so should we conclude with that there's a bunch more questions of course i mean we we didn't manage every every one of them so sorry about that i hope other people in the chat can answer it feel free to ask it again so people in the chat see it and we can we can answer it um but we have to switch to the talk so we don't get uh so we get back on track on the time so thanks everyone for the cool questions yeah um yeah hope uh you you learned something or you got more insight um thanks frank uh and um yeah let's continue um with the talks now with the rest of the schedule perfect thanks everyone thank you