Yes, like Jos, Lukas and Björn I (mostly known for my work on and maintenance of the LDAP backend) am leaving ownCloud Inc. Actually, the 20th of May was already my last day.
I decided to quit because not everything in the ownCloud Inc. company world evolved as I imagined. It's not necessarily bad, only it became clear that for me it is time for a change. No regrets, I have had a splendid time at ownCloud Inc. and am proud to have it as a part of my life and identity.

The ownCloud contributor conference comes closer and closer! Roughly two weeks are left until it kicks off on August 28th here in Berlin. You did not register yet? Please do at the conference site.

With time passing rapidly our dear Jos is like the sedulous ants, taking care of all the smaller and bigger things, hopping to and fro. Helping around a bit, I feel the air is heating up and tension rising. Yeah!

Recently I set up the Karma Javascript suite for locally running the Javascript tests for ownCloud. Since it was not totally straight forward to get it up an running, here be my setup notes.

First, it requires Node.js. They can be installed right out from the repositories. As I read somewhere, more recent versions are available on some PPA, but this one is sufficient. npm is its package manager.

Upfront, In case you did not get the news: last week we released ownCloud 8.1, despite the version number a major release!

Now I could spent a week to follow a pet project. I picked to revive ownCloud Bookmarks, which was launched years ago also by me. I passed on maintainership quite a while ago, but recently it was a little bit abandoned. This is my invitation to you users and develepors interested in ownCloud Bookmarks, to pick it up and work together on it. Especially to make it move forward, and ideally to find more co-maintainers. Check out the Bookmarks Github repo!

Update/Info: I continue my work at Nextcloud. /Update

With ownCloud it is possible to connect to one or more LDAP instances so existing users are able to login with their passwords and have email and pictures imported. However, if a somewhat bigger directory is in use, an improvable performance might be faced in some scenarios. Typically the first look at the Users page after configuring an LDAP connection can make the admin wait quite a while. Obscure rumours claim that this delay is sponsored by the coffee industry.

When a user account has been deleted, ownCloud will clean up after it. Files, group memberships and preferences are cleared and a notification is send to apps so they can clean up on their end. However, an LDAP user account cannot be deleted, since ownCloud does not write to the directory. Of course, an account can be deleted on the LDAP server. Unfortunately, we are not being informed about this and so data from LDAP users was kept around even when their accounts were long gone.

We needed to think of a way how to get rid of unwanted remains. And we did, and we implemented it, an this is how it works.

Currently I am enjoying my summer vacation. Vacation is when you do non-stop activities that make fun, no matter whether this is more relaxing or challenging, and usually in another place. So I am going to take the opportunity to visit Kazan, and furthermore I am taking the other opportunity and will give an ownCloud talk (btw, did you hear, ownCloud 7 was released?) at the local hackerspace, FOSS Labs. Due to my lack of Russian I will stick to English, however ;) So, if you are there and interested in ownCloud please save the date: Monday, July 28th, 18:00 FOSS Labs Universitetskaya 22, of. 114 420111 Kazan, Russia

In about a week we release version 6.0.3 of ownCloud Community Edition! It is a maintenance release that includes nearly two months of improvements (including performance improvements) and some fixes. I want to use this opportunity to shed some light on the fixes the LDAP back-end has seen.

There are no big things, however, but the performance improvements in sharing related methods and in the configuration wizard will significantly enhance the experience for end users and admins. The following list is not a complete one, but addresses the most notable changes.

Read an English announcement at Danimo's.

Das Release von ownCloud 6 ist keine Woche mehr entfernt. Der letzte Release Candidate ist veröffentlicht, die nächste Version klopft an der Tür. Dies gilt es gebührend zu feiern!

Release Party

• Mittwoch, 11. Dezember, 19 Uhr
• BeLUG, Lehrter Str. 53, 10557 Berlin (ca. 10min vom HBf)

We just released the Beta 1 of the upcoming ownCloud 6 series! It is spiced up with two new features. The most exciting one is probably collaborative editing of ODF documents. However, I do not want to write about it, ownCloud Documents is already covered by Frank.

The other feature that just went inside is revamped LDAP settings in a wizard-like fashion. Now, the minimum number of required fields you need to fill in is *drumrolls* 3! Of course without loosing the flexibility you are used to. Providing the LDAP server host, a user DN and a password is usually enough. ownCloud will take care of everything else. Some settings will be suggested, you can just accept them, and more will be auto-detected.

New wizard-like LDAP configuration