Nextcloud Hub 26: Digital sovereignty and Euro-Office on the desktop (video)

Nextcloud, a European digital collaboration platform provider, today launched Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer. At the heart of the release is the desktop version of Euro-Office, the European open source office suite that provides organizations with an alternative to Microsoft Office while ensuring their digital dominance. The release also reflects how, over the past year, Nextcloud has strengthened its collaborative product development with partners, customers and the open source community.

An alternative that ensures digital dominance over Microsoft Office, on the desktop

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Until now, Nextcloud Office users who worked with Euro-Office did so via the browser. With Hub 26 Summer, a dedicated desktop app is added to this option, allowing users to edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations locally, while keeping their files securely in Nextcloud. For organizations and individuals who prefer a traditional desktop experience, this fills one of the last gaps between Euro-Office and Microsoft Office, without requiring them to cede control of their data to a non-European provider. Office has also become noticeably faster in this release, thanks to improved filtering capabilities and document thumbnails, which make it faster to find and open the right file.

Euro-Office is being developed in collaboration with IONOS, Open-Xchange, Office.eu and other European partners, alongside a growing community of contributors. Much of the work on the desktop client itself came from the community, another example of the momentum the project has gained since its launch earlier this year. Although Euro-Office contributors and supporters are based in Europe, the open source solution is open to contributions from around the world and available globally.

Collaborative development: the ecosystem bears fruit

Earlier this year, Nextcloud announced that it would invest in collaboration with ISVs, partners, and the community. The “Hub 26 Summer” release is a visible result of this change of direction: an increasing proportion of the release’s major improvements were developed in collaboration with the organizations that use the software every day, rather than solely by Nextcloud.

This collaboration takes various forms within the ecosystem. Dataport, a provider of IT services for the public sector, is providing direct feedback to Nextcloud engineers on the new “Teams” feature, which gives project teams their own shared workspace. Meanwhile, developers at SURF—the Dutch organization for education and research cooperation—have directly contributed to the creation of a new calendar appointment booking feature.

The same approach is seen in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein , where the public administration manages a large number of specialized procedures (“Fachverfahren”) via Nextcloud Tables. Their teams needed a way to modify the structure of a table—for example, by adding columns or changing views—without having to rebuild the process that relied on it. In collaboration with Nextcloud engineers, this requirement added a new table import function.

In the Nextcloud Groupware applications—Calendar, Mail, and Contacts—more than half of the improvements in this release came from the community.

Availability

Nextcloud Hub 26 Summer is available today, while the Euro-Office desktop app will be available for download in the coming weeks. More information about the improvements can be found in the new release announcement.

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