Nextcloud has detailed its Hub 26 Summer release, and the headline additions for teams are a new "Classified" conversation preset in Nextcloud Talk and Channels, a way to broadcast updates to a wide audience. The company also says Office is coming to the desktop, and Photos gets a fresh take, though the announcement does not disclose pricing or a general availability date for the release.
Classified conversations are built for information that should stay inside a defined group. The preset turns off public links and guest access, limits forwarding, recordings and SIP, enforces a "Sensitive" status, and switches on expiration for messages and conversations by default. Channels work the other way: moderators publish posts while subscribers can only read and react, calls are disabled, and the participant list is visible only to moderators.
In Nextcloud Calendar, a new room finder lets users browse available rooms and resources for an event, with free/busy information showing what is actually open for the chosen time slot. Admins can manage rooms and resources through a web-based interface, a feature Nextcloud credits to its community. The room finder itself was developed with SURF, an organization using Nextcloud in a large academic environment.
Nextcloud Assistant, which the company describes as the first open source AI assistant, gains on-demand memory that carries what a user has told it across conversations, plus skills that let users teach it multi-step procedures and trigger them with a single phrase. Images dropped into the chat can be questioned or have their text translated, and an OCR tool pulls text from photos, receipts and handwritten notes. Audio uploads can generate subtitles and split transcripts into readable paragraphs. The Assistant can also schedule recurring tasks, such as compiling and sending a briefing message at 8 AM.
Nextcloud Tables, part of the Flow automation tools, adds relational columns that link cells to a source table so updates propagate automatically, and table structure export for moving columns, views or table-based apps into another table without touching its data. The relational columns feature was created together with Schleswig-Holstein, which uses Tables for specialized workflows in its administration. Notifications, column aliases and a Budibase integration round out the Flow changes.
Notes gets a Zen mode that hides the app interface except for the working area, along with ready-made templates, a note overview showing reading time, storage location and category, and version history in the sidebar. Nextcloud Governance, an enterprise compliance add-on released earlier this year and now in early access, covers a governance dashboard, sensitivity labels, retention policies, legal hold and share auditing. The company says an upcoming release with Nextcloud Enterprise will set the groundwork for extending Governance to other applications and adding eDiscovery.
The release follows Nextcloud's positioning of its Hub as a European alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, an argument the company has made around data residing on infrastructure customers control. Nextcloud will host a webinar on September 30 to walk through the new release and take questions in a live Q&A.
