ownCloud 5 Released With New Design, Other Important Improvements (Personal, Open Source Cloud Server Tool)

ownCloud is a free software alternative to proprietary web services such a Dropbox, Google Calendar and more. You can install it on your computer or web server and access (and share) your files from any OS, since ownCloud comes with desktop clients for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux as well as mobile clients for Android and iOS.

"Unlike Dropbox and other commercial sync and share apps, which store data in the cloud in remote, third-party data centers, ownCloud is deployed on-premise, seamlessly integrating with existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools. With more than 750,000 users worldwide, ownCloud offers the ease-of-use, flexibility, sophistication and security not available from basic syncing apps and third-party storage."

Today, a new ownCloud version has been released - 5 -, which comes with many new features and improvements as well as a new interface.

New features and improvements in ownCloud 5:

• new design;
• option to restore deleted files;
• new search engine which includes a new Lucene-based full text search engine app;
• ownCloud now uses Clam antivirus to prevent distributing infected files;
• rewritten photo gallery;
• improved contacts, calendar, bookmarks, app management, versioning and file cache (up to 500% faster);
• faster sync for the desktop client;
• better security;
• enhanced external storage app;
• new documentation;
• many other changes.

For a complete list of changes, see THIS page.

Also, in an update that should be available in April, ownCloud will get a newly designed server-side encryption application.

Here are a few more screenshots with the latest ownCloud 5:

And here's the Linux desktop client:

With this version, I was finally able to connect my Dropbox account to ownCloud (it has never worked for me in the previous releases for some reason):

However, after doing this, ownCloud became very slow and it still is when trying to access the Dropbox folder. So this feature still needs a bit of work. By the way, besides Dropbox, ownCloud also supports other external storages such as Amazon S3, Google Drive, FTP, OpenStack Swift, SMB / CIFS, WebDavv and SFTP.

Download ownCloud or try the demo.