Hi everyone. I'm Frank. I originally founded ownCloud and now Nextcloud. The motivation is and was to build a self hosted and fully open source solution so that people can control their data and communication. After living in Boston, USA I now moved back to Stuttgart, Germany. Looking forward to a great discussion here.

@dafyre said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

What are the biggest hurdles you guys are hitting now?

Honestly my biggest hurdle at the moment is to keep up with all the requests and feedback. A lot of people are interested in Nextcloud. #IOT

@scottalanmiller said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Are there any plans to actually integrate an email server or just to remain as a client? Not saying that that is my vote either way, just interested in the email roadmap.

So one of the goals of Nextcloud is to be super easy to install. Because of that it is a pure PHP application that is super easy to install. So we can't include a full IMAP/SMTP server. And to be honest there is also no point in reinventing the wheel. A lot of great open source mailservers exists. Just install one of them and Nextcloud can use it.

@RojoLoco As a server OS? We tried to do this in the past but PHP on Windows is just not very good. So the recommended way is to run a Linux VM on the Windows Server. This works fine.

@FATeknollogee On Nextcloud.com you can download fully configured VMs. Should be easy to run.

@dafyre Sure. The Spreed is improving fast. Will be a lot better in the next release. We also want to promote the email and chat integration more. And we plan to integrate all this communication channels more into each other in the future.

@scottalanmiller said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

@RojoLoco said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Any plans to make a version for windows server?

Does the existing version run on Windows? It's PHP and standard components.

Sorry if this is answered, Internet has been down for half an hour and I've been in the process of replying all this time.

Windows Server is no longer supported because PHP on Windows is not very good. But you can run a Linux VM on a Windows server

@jt1001001 said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Any plans for more of a Nexcloud "appliance" , say a NAS with Nexcloud integrated. Love the Raspberry Pi WD project but one still has to provide the Pi

Yes. We hope that more and more hardware manufacturers ship boxes with Nextcloud installed. We ourselves are not in the hardware business. But if someone knows someone who could/should ship Nextcloud preinstalled then we should talk and recommend this.

@Dashrender said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Any chance you're working toward an ActiveSync add-in?

I.e. can the email client connect natively with O365 or Exchange for all of that goodness?

So it would be possible to implement ActiveSync relatively easy by including projects like zpush. Maybe someone does it. But i'm not sure how useful it is to use the Nextcloud Mailinterface with the Office365 backend. But maybe I'm missing the usecase here

@scottalanmiller said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Are there any plans to actually integrate an email server or just to remain as a client? Not saying that that is my vote either way, just interested in the email roadmap.

So one of the goals of Nextcloud is to be super easy to install. Because of that it is a pure PHP application that is super easy to install. So we can't include a full IMAP/SMTP server. And to be honest there is also no point in reinventing the wheel. A lot of great open source mailservers exists. Just install one of them and Nextcloud can use it.

@dafyre said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

What are the biggest hurdles you guys are hitting now?

Honestly my biggest hurdle at the moment is to keep up with all the requests and feedback. A lot of people are interested in Nextcloud. #IOT

@jt1001001 said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Any plans for more of a Nexcloud "appliance" , say a NAS with Nexcloud integrated. Love the Raspberry Pi WD project but one still has to provide the Pi

Yes. We hope that more and more hardware manufacturers ship boxes with Nextcloud installed. We ourselves are not in the hardware business. But if someone knows someone who could/should ship Nextcloud preinstalled then we should talk and recommend this.

@Dashrender said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Normal users can't be asked to type something in. Heck it's hard enough sometimes getting them to browse through and find the s: drive.

To make this really user-centric, it needs to have a button inside the save dialog that allows them to browse to where they want to open/save a file, like JB's example.

My whole thinking is a way to move from the current workflows of today and network shares to a future workflow of accessing things directly through the apps.

This is how most mobile apps work.

I'm not a Windows expert. But isn't there a way to create a network share entry in the save dialog for all users. A WebDAV entry is similar to a normal network share entry.

@scottalanmiller said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

@RojoLoco said in Nextcloud AMA!!:

Any plans to make a version for windows server?

Does the existing version run on Windows? It's PHP and standard components.

Sorry if this is answered, Internet has been down for half an hour and I've been in the process of replying all this time.

Windows Server is no longer supported because PHP on Windows is not very good. But you can run a Linux VM on a Windows server

@dafyre Sure. The Spreed is improving fast. Will be a lot better in the next release. We also want to promote the email and chat integration more. And we plan to integrate all this communication channels more into each other in the future.

@Dashrender Another way of doing this is to use WebDAV as a mount and directly safe there.

@FATeknollogee On Nextcloud.com you can download fully configured VMs. Should be easy to run.

@RojoLoco As a server OS? We tried to do this in the past but PHP on Windows is just not very good. So the recommended way is to run a Linux VM on the Windows Server. This works fine.