Beta of Latest ownCloud Community Edition

 Significantly faster uploading, downloading and syncing of files – even very large files, greater and more granular administrative control and even a presentation app are all the latest enhancements to the community edition of ownCloud, the open source file sync and share project, the beta of which was just released.

Built through community support – the latest ownCloud Inc. adds features like sub-admins for groups – the ability to assign a sub-administrator to a group to handle account management, desktop fast syncing – which reduces server load and enhances the sync algorithm for a faster, quicker, better sync with far less load on the server, enhanced permissions – more granular permissions so end users can determine who can do what with shared date, new user-management back ends, so ownCloud can authenticate against remote webdav, IMAP, Samba and FTP servers, and support of shared calenders – so end users can view shared calendars across multiple devices.

With more than 600,000 users world-wide, ownCloud offers the ease-of-use of Dropbox, with the flexibility and security that can only be provided by software installed on site. Users can host their own data sync and share services on their own hardware and storage, use popular public hosting and storage offerings, or both.

The latest ownCloud also includes a new app to automatically update it and a basic HTML5 presentation program.

"This beta does a great deal to scale, enhance the user experience and increase control of ownCloud," said Frank Karlitschek, founder of ownCloud. "Personally, I also really like the shared calender functionality because it demonstrates clearly that we can live in a world of device and location independence securely and privately."

Major Improvements

• Faster Syncing with checksums for files and folders: The sync mechanism now compares the checksums (hashes) for files and folders, which reduces the load of the ownCloud Desktop Clients on the corresponding server and allows syncing between server and desktops not running on an identical time.
• Sub-Administrators for Groups: Each group can have assigned one or more sub-administrators who can manage accounts without being able to change other things inside ownCloud.
• Mounting of external Storage: External Cloud Storage (Dropbox, Google, etc.) can be mounted into an ownCloud user account and be part of the ownCloud user folders.
• Syncing of shared address books: Shared address books can now be synced to other devices.
• Support for replacing files by name in web interface: Uploading a file with the same file name in the web interface will now generate a new version of the file and display the uploaded file as the newest version.
• Drag and drop contacts between address books: When several address books are used, contacts can be moved or copied easily.
• Reworked LDAP and Contacts modules: Both modules have gained significant performance enhancements.