Today, March 8, 2016, ownCloud Inc. is proud to announce the release and immediate availability of ownCloud 9.0, the next major release of the self-hosting cloud server used by millions of people worldwide.

ownCloud Server 9.0 is without any doubt the biggest release of the world's leading file sharing and sync solution, which is used by over 8 million users around the globe, and it promises to bring the collaboration and federation features to new levels thanks to the addition of new, innovative tools, as well as to improve the software's scalability.

Last week, we had the great pleasure of sharing with our readers an exclusive article on one of ownCloud 9.0's new features, code signing, which promises to offer users with a safer home for all their data by verifying the integrity of their ownCloud installations during upgrades or when installing apps, which also need to follow the new code signing specifications.

"With 8 million users, ownCloud is worlds’ leading file sync and share solution providing users with a safe home for all their data. Founded six years ago as a project with the goal of bringing privacy and control back to users, ownCloud is where it is today thanks to contributions by well over 1000 open source programmers, designers, translators and others," said ownCloud.

CERN, AARnet, and ownCloud

Taking a closer look at the new features implemented in ownCloud Server 9.0, we can notice that it now offers improved notifications, the ability to add comments and tags to any shared files, as well as better user interaction thanks to the standalone activity feed, all of which should help you find and organize your files faster and stay up-to-date with any modifications, always.

Administrators will be happy to learn that it's now possible to add as many ownCloud servers as they want/need as trusted servers to their infrastructure, making sharing and exchanging of usernames, along with automatic names completion from users of all shared servers a breeze. Trusted ownCloud servers can be manually added by admins, who have control over the automatic addition of servers.

With ownCloud 9.0, organizations and institutions like CERN and AARNet will be able to integrate deeply their massive ownCloud installations with various storage solutions and their infrastructure, thanks to the addition of a new storage API (Application Programming Interface) that allows for unimaginable scaling levels.

"ownCloud always supported local file systems and NFS storage. Running on top of IBM Spectrum Scale or storage products from Fujitsu and others allowed ownCloud users to scale to 100.000s of users," said Jos Poortvliet, ownCloud Community Manager in a recent blog post. "With ownCloud 9.0 we wanted to create the ability for storage backends to deeply integrate in their underlying storage, using, for example, their existing metadata capabilities."

ownCloud Server 9.0 Enterprise Edition coming next month

And that's not all, as ownCloud 9.0 ships today with updated Contacts and Calendar apps, new Mail app, extended output details for occ scan:files, more visible application updates, and a much smoother upgrade process thanks to the brand-new standalone updater. You can try out ownCloud 9.0 online, and check the gallery below for more details.

The community edition of ownCloud Server 9.0 is available for download right now via our website as a source package that you can deploy on your Linux kernel-based server, or straight from the project's website as binary packages for various GNU/Linux operating systems. ownCloud Server 9.0 Enterprise Edition will be released in April 2016.

New Mail app

Calendar app

Documents app