Nextcloud has announced the release of a major upgrade to Nextcloud Office and knowledge management app Collectives. Productivity improvements in these releases include direct local editing and improvements to Secure View in Nextcloud Office and a series of updates to Collectives that challenge the leading cloud providers of wiki software.

Nextcloud Office delivers Nextcloud users a powerful, self-hosted office suite with collaborative editing and excellent compatibility with proprietary file formats. This release introduces improvements based on feedback from the Nextcloud Office Advisory Board. Members from German, French, Swedish, Swiss and other European governments requested UI, security and compatibility improvements. According to the company, the release delivers with a more familiar user interface, updates to Secure View and the ability to open documents in a local editor directly from the Nextcloud Office interface.

With Secure View users can share documents with a public link in a read-only, no-download capacity. To limit data leaks through screenshots, Nextcloud Office can show watermarks on documents when Secure View is used. This feature still allows recipients to collaboratively edit copy-protected documents!

The feature has now been expanded to internal use, allowing users to limit the downloading of documents for other users, be it guests or normal accounts. This is a common use case in large organisations that have to limit the spread of critical information and work on a need- to-know basis.

Edit Locally is a new feature introduced to deal with extremely complex documents. Certain complicated documents or documents connecting to other local data sources as used in government organisations require a local editor. Nextcloud Office introduces a button in the user interface which saves the file, closes the editor, locks the file, syncs it to the desktop of the user and opens it with the local editor. Once the file has been edited and saved and the editor is closed, the file is synced back and unlocked on the server. Edit Locally is not limited to Nextcloud Office documents.

Nextcloud Files offers access to Edit Locally from the file menu, enabling any document to be edited in a local editor. This is ideal for complex documents like Photoshop files, video editor materials and more. Edit Locally requires the Nextcloud Desktop Client.