Upcoming ownCloud Enterprise 5 improves authentication speed

Cloud collaboration company ownCloud has announced that it will make version 5 of its open source ownCloud Enterprise product available at the beginning of July. A release candidate for the software is now available for customers wanting to try out the new features. Building on ownCloud Community Edition 5, which appeared in March, the Enterprise Edition adds Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server backends, a provisioning API, mobile applications, anonymous uploads without an ownCloud account, and home directory mounting. Enterprise Edition customers will benefit from support for the platform, which has been tested explicitly for production use in enterprise deployments, and also from access to the ownCloud developers.

Other new features in ownCloud Enterprise 5 include better Active Directory and LDAP support which, according to the developers, improves the speed at which users can authenticate with the server. The company also promises that its new native at-rest AES encryption is compatible with customers' systems regardless of what type of data storage they are using. Together with a new provisioning API, this allows customers to integrate their ownCloud installation into existing storage services. Deleted files can now be restored by users without the help of an administrator and account management has been simplified with a redesigned settings interface for both normal users and administrators.

A release candidate for ownCloud Enterprise 5 is currently available, with the final release scheduled for the beginning of July. The Enterprise Edition is dual licensed under the same GPL/AGPL licence as the Community Edition with an additional commercial licence. The subscription pricing includes support and, when the final release becomes available, will start at $15 per user per month with a minimum of 50 users. A list of the new features in ownCloud Enterprise 5 is available on the What is New page on the ownCloud web site, the release candidate can be downloaded by clicking the "Download now" button and providing an email address – the user will then receive an email with a download link.

(fab)