A new look for private cloud ownCloud 5.0

OwnCloud 5.0 includes a new interface; the left sidebar is smaller, and the settings menu can now be found by clicking on the user name at the top right

The community edition of ownCloud 5.0 is now complete. A number of updates have been made to the locally installable cloud services: the web frontend, for example, has been redesigned to provide more space for listing files than in previous versions. ownCloud 5.0's interface also now displays the current user's name, which can be clicked on to reach the user settings menu and administration tools.

The integration of ClamAV means that files uploaded to the server can be automatically checked for viruses, with suspicious files automatically separated out. Accidentally deleted files can also be recovered now.

Improvements have been made to the calendar and contacts cloud services, which had been largely neglected before. Events can now easily be classified as public, private or confidential, and a number of issues related to letters with umlauts have been solved. The ownCloud developers have introduced categories for contacts so that they can be sorted in several ways, not just alphabetically.

The developers have also made some changes under the bonnet. External storage services like Amazon's S3 and Google Drive can now be updated in the background, and communication between clients and the ownCloud server has been optimised.

The community edition of ownCloud 5.0 is licensed under the AGPLv3 and can be downloaded free of charge from ownCloud.org. If ownCloud 4.5 has already been installed on a machine, however, it should not be updated using rsync as usual. Instead – after a complete backup, for safety's sake – users should delete all ownCloud files and directories, except for the data directory, which contains the user data, and the configuration file in the config directory, before unpacking the tar archive with ownCloud 5.0. The next time ownCloud is opened, all data will migrate to the new version.

(fab)