ownCloud is an

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

product for sharing and syncing of files in distributed and federated enterprise scenarios. It allows companies and remote end-users to organize their documents on servers, computers and mobile devices and work with them collaboratively, while keeping a centrally organized and synchronized state. ownCloud supports extensions like online document editing (

Collabora Collabora is a global private company headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom, with offices in Cambridge and Montreal. It provides open-source consultancy, training and products to companies. Collabora's initial focus was instant messagin ...

OnlyOffice OnlyOffice (formerly TeamLab), stylized as ONLYOFFICE, is a free software office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA, a subsidiary of "New Communication Technologies", a company from Russia, but headquartered in Riga, Latvia. In Russian marke ...

Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name M ...

and

Microsoft Office Online Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...

), calendar and contact synchronization. Users can work with documents from a browser, and there are clients for a variety of operating systems as well as mobile clients for Android and iPhone. Starting with version 2.0.0 "Infinite Scale", ownCloud is programmed in Go, and its web interface is written in

Vue.js Vue.js (commonly referred to as Vue; pronounced "view") is an open-source model–view–viewmodel front end JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications. It was created by Evan You, and is maintained by him ...

Microservices A microservice architecture – a variant of the service-oriented architecture structural style – is an architectural pattern that arranges an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, fine-grained services, communicating through lightw ...

, cloud-native Technologies and a three-tier-architecture without database replaced the formerly used

LAMP Lamp, Lamps or LAMP may refer to: Lighting * Oil lamp, using an oil-based fuel source * Kerosene lamp, using kerosene as a fuel * Electric lamp, or light bulb, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity * Light fixture, or li ...

stack while providing full API compatibility to prior versions. Up to version 10, ownCloud used

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

to access

SQLite SQLite (, ) is a database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it belongs to the family of embedded databases. It is the m ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

databases on the server.

History

ownCloud is a company from Nürnberg, Germany focused on enterprise users of its software. The ownCloud project was started in January 2010 and the company was founded in 2011. In 2016 one of the founders left the company, creating the fork

Nextcloud Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. Nextcloud provides functionally similar to Dropbox, Office 365 or Google Drive when used with integrated office suite solutions Collabora Online or Onl ...

. ownCloud GmbH continued operations, and in July 2016 secured financing from new investors and took over the business of the American company ownCloud Inc. In November 2022, ownCloud published version 2.0.0 "Infinite Scale", which was developed with help from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

) and is a complete rewrite in the Go programming language. CERN uses ownCloud with its EOS filesystem to handle (as of 2021) 12 petabytes of data in 1.4 billion files.

Server releases

Overview

Design

Desktop clients for ownCloud are available for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

, as well as mobile clients for

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

and Android devices. Files and other data (such as calendars, contacts or bookmarks) can also be accessed, managed, and uploaded using a web browser. Updates are pushed to all computers and mobile devices connected to an account.

Encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can decip ...

of files may be enforced by the server administrator.

Features

ownCloud files are stored in conventional directory structures and can be accessed via

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for con ...

if necessary. User files are encrypted both at rest and during transit. ownCloud can synchronize with local clients running

and various

distributions. ownCloud users can manage calendars (

CalDAV Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV, or CalDAV, is an Internet standard allowing a client to access and manage calendar data along with the ability to schedule meetings with users on the same or on remote servers. It lets multiple users in diff ...

), contacts (

CardDAV vCard Extensions to WebDAV (CardDAV) is an address book client/server protocol designed to allow users to access and share contact data on a server. The CardDAV protocol was developed by the IETF and was published as in August 2011. CardDAV is ...

) scheduled tasks and streaming media (

Ampache Ampache is a free software web-based audio file manager and media server. The name is a blend of the words "amplifier" and "Apache". It was originally written to take advantage of Apache's mod_mp3 module but has since been adapted to use its own s ...

) from within the platform. ownCloud permits user and group administration (via

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory servi ...

). Content can be shared by granular read/write permissions between users or groups. Alternatively, ownCloud users can create public URLs for sharing files. Furthermore, users can interact with the browser-based

ODF The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed wi ...

-format

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

bookmarking Bookmarking (also "gene bookmarking" or "mitotic bookmarking") refers to a potential mechanism of transmission of gene expression programs through cell division. During mitosis, gene transcription is silenced and most transcription factors are r ...

service,

URL shortening URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page. This is achieved by using a redirect which links to the web page that has ...

suite, gallery,

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many di ...

feed reader and document viewer tools from within ownCloud. ownCloud can be augmented with "one-click" applications and connection to Dropbox,

Google Drive Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud (on Google's servers), synchronize files across devices, and share files. In add ...

and

Amazon S3 Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its ...

. Enterprise customers have access to apps with additional functionality, which are intended for organizations with more than 500 users. An Enterprise subscription includes support services. Commercial features include

end-to-end encryption End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecommunications service providers, telecom providers, Internet ...

ransomware Ransomware is a type of malware from cryptovirology that threatens to publish the victim's personal data or permanently block access to it unless a ransom is paid off. While some simple ransomware may lock the system without damaging any files, ...

and antivirus protection, branding, document classification, and single sign-on via OpenID.

References

External links

* {{official
Forum for open source community and project
Cloud storage Free software for cloud computing Free software programmed in JavaScript Free software programmed in PHP Software using the GNU AGPL license Internet software for Linux