VGBlog

As I also mentioned in my previous articles, nowadays it is not possible to fully trust to a provider when it comes to privacy and your sensitive data. For this reason, the community has created ownCloud. ownCloud is a great open source cloud application. Not only being able to store/share your files, you can also use it as a replacement for your calendar, address book application, music application, video viewer and more...

There are already more than 200 apps available and waiting to be installed for various purposes on apps.owncloud.org:

• A password manager
• RSS reader
• Mozilla Syncronizer
• Chat between users
• Collaborative document editing

are some examples of the available apps...

I met ownCloud after reading a Ubuntu magazine called SUDO. At that time, ownCloud had its version 3. At that time, the user interface looked like this:

ownCloud was a great name for a cloud system and I was pretty sure that it was going to be successful. 

I always believed that the first way to contribute to one project should start with using it. It really helps you to understand the posibilities that the project could do and warms you up with it. Then, you'd better continue by translating it (if possible), contributing to the documentation, or answering the questions on the forums/irc/mailinglists etc.

If you feel like you can use the software well, can help solve others' problems and have some programming skills, you are ready to go! You can contribute! ownCloud community consists of great people always willing to help you solve your problems and listen to your suggestions. It is an open community that always invites people to contribute.

Back to the topic... When I was following the updates, a new version came up - ownCloud 4.0:

In this version, not big visual improvements, but many background changes have been made.

My contribution to ownCloud started by translating it with version 6 which looked like this:

There were many improvements done and enhancements made with this version and one of them was the collaborative editing - the Documents app:

It let users to work on the same rich document (ODT or DOC files) at the same time. Even, the documents could be made public so that users with the link were able to join and edit them.

Recently, a new version of ownCloud is released: 7. This version had great improvements, it is the best (until we release the next one), and most advanced release (again, so far :)):

Let's see some major changes in this version:

Server-to-Server Sharing

One of the biggest enhancements in this release is the Server2Server sharing. This feature is very interesting and exciting as this helps us broaden our expectations about what ownCloud can do... Let us see what this feature is.

User Foo has an ownCloud server. She has a text file that she always wants to work together with User Bar. However, Bar does not have an account on that server, but fortunately, has his own instance. Thanks to Server2Server feature, Foo shares the file normally with a public link and sends to Bar:

Bar, uses the link and sees the following page:

He clicks on the "Add to ownCloud" link and writes his own ownCloud address. He is redirected to his instance and confirms the question:

From now on, whenever she edits the file, the file is automatically synchronized with Bar's instance and they always have the same version of the file. The first instance edits the file:

And the second instance (in this case Bar's ownCloud):

Amazing, isn't it?

The original sharer is also able to disable reshares from the shared items.

External Mount

ownCloud lets you mount external storages to extend your quota and/or collect all files from other services such as Dropbox, GoogleDrive, FTP, Amazon S3, or even a local directory from your hard drive...

If you are an administrator, after enabling External storage support app, you will be provided the following section in Admin page:

Choose an external storage type and fill in the required fields. Afterwards, if the settings are correct, you will be seeing a green icon next to the folder name and also the service as a folder will be seen in your Files app. From now on, you can start using it. The folder name can be changed any time by again going into Admin page.

You should have noticed the external folder icon that is different than the other folders in the instance itself.

If you want your users to use this functionality and connect their own external services, you can check the services you want enabled in the admin page. Then, the users will be able to set those mounts from their personal settings page.

There are a lot more to explore, but I will be writing them as a separate article. Hope you enjoy ownCloud as much as I do. We would also be happy if you contribute as well, by testing, reporting bugs, requesting new features, coding, designing!

Thank you!