ownCloud

Today, I blog about blogging. My goal is to convince you, hard working contributor to KDE, ownCloud or openSUSE, that you should regularly blog about the awesome you do.Blogging is greatContributors blogging about what they do is awesome, really. ... [More] This way, we:Share knowledge so others don't have to re-invent the wheelShare ideas so others know what we're up to and can help improve plansGet help so readers might feel compelled to help out!Give help so using ownCloud/KDE/openSUSE/etc becomes easier for peopleIncrease our visibility so users/developers know who to beat up talk toCreate some noise for the outside forums, news sites, magazines etc - press in generalAnd that's all absolutely awesome. I even bet there are at least 3 more reasons why blogging is good for your community and I hereby offer cookies for whoever shares three other reasons in the comments section.But let's be honest. Who cares about how it benefits whatever? It's the age of me me and more me!But what really matters...So I want to make clear that YOU benefit. Taking time off to write down what you're working on, putting ideas in order—this is incredibly useful. You will not only become a better writer but also a better thinker. Better at expressing your ideas but also better at putting them in order, examining them, refining them.Blogging makes you stop and think about what you are doing. You take a little time to dive a bit deeper in what drives you, why you work on what you work on and how you can do better.This should make clear that the idea of "I have nothing to say" makes no sense. If you are doing things, you must be thinking about them. Blogging is just thinking out loud. Which helps YOU think and, as I pointed out above, helps others see what you think about and give you input.HOW to do it then?I'm not going to say writing is simple. If you look up the first posts on my blog, well, let's just say it didn't come by itself for me either. You might be looking at a blank page for a while. But it gets easy when you have something to say! If you're enthusiastic about something or pondering a complicated problem, that is the moment to start. Open your favorite text editor and just blurt down your thoughts, why you're happy/angry/enthusiastic/etc.Then structure it a bit, try to explain the things. You might have learned this in the past already: explaining something complicated to somebody else is awesome, because you learn from doing that yourself. Maybe even more than the person you're explaining to!Then make it more presentable. Add a few headers above big paragraphs to break it up, maybe add a picture. Flickr is a great source of pics and it makes your blog a bit lighter, but it is not mandatory at all. Then just publish. Because, really, you can polish forever but it will never be perfect. And you learn while writing. So write, publish, and write some more!On the idea of "you must do regular writing": a myth. Yes, writing about what you did last week is helpful. It gives a base to start with, keeps your life organized. But it is not The Only Way To Success when it comes to blogging. You need a bit of inspiration. I've gone months without blogs, and had weeks with several. That might not be awesome from a 'social media' perspective but really, who gives a rats' ass about that? I know I don't.Write when you are thinking about something, when you're inspired. That's enough.ConclusionBlogging is helpful. Most people don't feel compelled to share their expertise, knowledge and ideas. That is OK, of course - but if you are willing to blog, please do it! It isn't as hard as it sometimes feels and it is more helpful for yourself than you might think.And if your project has a blog roll like planet KDE, planet openSUSE and ownCloud News, get your blog on there! More readers = more comments = more motivation and more value for you. Really!For the ownCloud folk: contact me if you want your blog on our blog roll. I'd be happy to add it! [Less]

In other words, Safe Harbor counts for nothing.

Is 2014 the year of hybrid cloud enterprise file sync and share?

In about a week we release version 6.0.3 of ownCloud Community Edition! It is a maintenance release that includes nearly two months of improvements (including performance improvements) and some fixes. I want to use this opportunity to shed some light ... [More] on the fixes the LDAP back-end has seen. There are no big things, however, but the performance improvements in sharing related methods and in the configuration wizard will significantly enhance the experience for end users and admins. The following list is not a complete one, but addresses the most notable changes. Faster user retrieval in sharing dialogue By optimizing the behavior in fetching and caching the display name, additional per user queries to the LDAP server are not necessary anymore. Fortunately, it was a low hanging fruit, because we requested the attribute on the original search query already. The missing piece was to push the value to the LDAP cache. The result, obviously, is that users will appear faster in the share dialogue and the number of LDAP queries is reduced. Regular updates of email (and quota) Users really appreciate the feature to send email notifications when sharing files. Now, they found out that LDAP users were not notified, although the email attribute was configured properly. Well, yes, the email was only fetched upon login. If a user never logged in before, for example, the email address would not have been known to ownCloud. Previously, this was totally OK as there was no big use for the email address nevertheless, but things are different today. Now, user details like user quota and the email address will be fetched initially with mapping of the user (one-time happening) and on the regular user exists check (with utilizing the LDAP cache). So the email address will be accurate whenever the notification will be used. More reliable Configuration Wizard The LDAP Wizard has seen two major improvements. First, when determining the object classes in the User and Group Filter tabs, it does not look at every available object anymore. A nasty mistake by missing to implement a limitation. Now, only three LDAP objects will be looked at, which reduces the detection time massively, especially with bigger LDAP setups. Another issue has been a race condition that could lead to a reset (respectively automatic compilation) of the LDAP filters. No undesired surprises any more. More accurate reporting Do you know the ownCloud command line client? It gives the administrator some tools for managing ownCloud that are handy to not (only) have in the web interface. There is also a method to get the total number of users, user:report. In LDAP we need to count the whole result set for this. If available (depending on PHP version and LDAP server configuration), we work with paged results. Well, we should, and we do since now also in this case. This allows us to get a specific total number from Active Directory. For OpenLDAP however, the configured size limit on the LDAP server is the maximum number of results we can get. It is because OpenLDAP follows a suggestion of the awkward RFC 2696 (section 6) and AD does not (guess who wrote the RFC). FreeIPA compatibility Good news for FreeIPA users: Robin McCorkell (thank you!) added support for the UUID attribute used in FreeIPA so the configuration will work right out of the box without any changes in the expert settings. ownCloud 6.0.3 RC ownCloud 6.0.3 is currently in the Release Candidate stage. With so many different setups out there in the wild we always appreciate testers. So, if you have some time left, please get it and poke around! Also, the temporary changelog is available. Tags: ownCloudPlanetOwnCloudPlanetUbuntu [Less]

In about a week we release version 6.0.3 of ownCloud Community Edition! It is a maintenance release that includes nearly two months of improvements (including performance improvements) and some fixes. I want to use this opportunity to shed some light ... [More] on the fixes the LDAP back-end has seen. There are no big things, however, but the performance improvements in sharing related methods and in the configuration wizard will significantly enhance the experience for end users and admins. The following list is not a complete one, but addresses the most notable changes. Faster user retrieval in sharing dialogue By optimizing the behavior in fetching and caching the display name, additional per user queries to the LDAP server are not necessary anymore. Fortunately, it was a low hanging fruit, because we requested the attribute on the original search query already. The missing piece was to push the value to the LDAP cache. The result, obviously, is that users will appear faster in the share dialogue and the number of LDAP queries is reduced. Regular updates of email (and quota) Users really appreciate the feature to send email notifications when sharing files. Now, they found out that LDAP users were not notified, although the email attribute was configured properly. Well, yes, the email was only fetched upon login. If a user never logged in before, for example, the email address would not have been known to ownCloud. Previously, this was totally OK as there was no big use for the email address nevertheless, but things are different today. Now, user details like user quota and the email address will be fetched initially with mapping of the user (one-time happening) and on the regular user exists check (with utilizing the LDAP cache). So the email address will be accurate whenever the notification will be used. More reliable Configuration Wizard The LDAP Wizard has seen two major improvements. First, when determining the object classes in the User and Group Filter tabs, it does not look at every available object anymore. A nasty mistake by missing to implement a limitation. Now, only three LDAP objects will be looked at, which reduces the detection time massively, especially with bigger LDAP setups. Another issue has been a race condition that could lead to a reset (respectively automatic compilation) of the LDAP filters. No undesired surprises any more. More accurate reporting Do you know the ownCloud command line client? It gives the administrator some tools for managing ownCloud that are handy to not (only) have in the web interface. There is also a method to get the total number of users, user:report. In LDAP we need to count the whole result set for this. If available (depending on PHP version and LDAP server configuration), we work with paged results. Well, we should, and we do since now also in this case. This allows us to get a specific total number from Active Directory. For OpenLDAP however, the configured size limit on the LDAP server is the maximum number of results we can get. It is because OpenLDAP follows a suggestion of the awkward RFC 2696 (section 6) and AD does not (guess who wrote the RFC). FreeIPA compatibility Good news for FreeIPA users: Robin McCorkell (thank you!) added support for the UUID attribute used in FreeIPA so the configuration will work right out of the box without any changes in the expert settings. ownCloud 6.0.3 RC ownCloud 6.0.3 is currently in the Release Candidate stage. With so many different setups out there in the wild we always appreciate testers. So, if you have some time left, please get it and poke around! Also, the temporary changelog is available. Tags: ownCloudPlanetOwnCloudPlanetUbuntu [Less]

It's becoming conference season again... Tomorrow morning I'll fly to Dubrovnik for the openSUSE Conference. I give no less than 5 talks and one workshop. Don't worry, I'm not DDOSing the event, the talks are restricted to 30 minutes (even though I ... [More] have about 1 hour of content for each, let's see how that goes). My sessions:Social skills for geeksPresenting awesome (workshop about giving presentations)How to run a booth and present your projectWhere KDE is and where it is goingCloudy experiences at home (about ownCloud!)Community building in 10 stepsThat's quite a bunch, I know, but it'll be fun! I look forward to Dubrovnik, although I see it will be rainy and not that warm. Ah, sad...LinuxTag 2014 - all changeA much bigger deal, for me, is LinuxTag. This year, it is considerably different from the previous few years: no more in the Messe! Instead, the team is collaborating with DroidCon and Re:Publica. That, combined with the location (Station in Berlin), could potentially be awesome! Here I give one talk about the future of KDE. I'll also be speaking at the Community Leadership Summit Europe about Open Governance.But more importantly, I'll be organizing the LT booth for three projects: ownCloud, KDE and openSUSE. Yeah, ambitious again! Not only that, we're not going for the traditional booth. Instead, I've proposed to do something different: have a track of technical mini-workshops at the booth. 45 minute talks, small, hands-on, about the technology of these projects. So, think about building packages with the Open Build Service, writing an ownCloud App or developing a QML based Plasma widget.Needing some helpThe idea seems generally liked but I haven't found anybody for any of the three above potential talks - so if you can and want to do that or something like it, please let me know! We won't have too much traditional booth space, just enough for a bit of stuff and one or two ppl answering questions. The talks will repeat every day so as volunteer, you give your talk 3 times, once every day. Otherwise you are free to enjoy the talks as well as the Re:Publica booth area. As the tickets are not cheap (Eur 149!) this is a nice way to get into LinuxTag for free (I have only 2 tickets per booth, though). You'll get hugs and Club Mate as much as you want. And there's travel support available for all these projects!Help me out, please! And if you can't - at least, be sure to visit the booth at LinuxTag or come say hi at the openSUSE Conference! [Less]

Enterprise clouds provide organizations with a way to secure data and ensure better control over the data and applications. However, public clouds provide organizations with a cost effective and scalable solution. In order to help organizations ... [More] combine the advantages of the public cloud even as they use the enterprise cloud for security reasons, ownCloud has released an enterprise version of its popular File Sync and Share product. [Less]

It is the very nature of what we do, our business model and product itself.

But has nothing in body. If you don't count this.

But has nothing in body. If you don't count this.