Some of us still run standalone office applications, but most people today use cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) programs for our work. 

However, do you really want to pay annual service fees to Google, Microsoft, or Zoho? Can you trust them with your information, especially since every company with an artificial intelligence (AI) program wants to dig through your data? If you're concerned about those issues, why not run your own cloud-based SaaS, where you call the shots? The good news is you can, with Nextcloud Hub.

Also: Why some companies are backing away from the public cloud

Like the brand-name office suites you already know, Nextcloud Hub comes with pretty much every office application and service you could ever want. This collection starts with Nextcloud Files, an open-source infrastructure-as-a-service cloud file storage system. I've used this system to store my files remotely since Nextcloud was forked from OwnCloud in 2016. It just works.

Over the years, Nextcloud added other open-source programs until, in early 2020, the company started offering Hub, which integrated numerous programs into an all-in-one desktop office suite. With Hub, users were finally liberated from relying on hyper-scale SaaS cloud services. 

Today, Hub offers Nextcloud Office, which is based on Collabra Online, the online version of LibreOffice. It also comes with Nextcloud Talk for audio/video conferencing and text chat; Nextcloud Groupware for calendar, contacts, and mail management; and, its newest addition, Nextcloud Assistant, an AI client. 

Assistant is the frontend of a large language models (LLM) client and uses the OpenAI application programming interface (API). With this client, you can connect to OpenAI. You can also connect to a self-hosted LocalAI, a free, open-source OpenAI alternative, or an Ollama instance. Ollama enables you to run private instances of many different LLMs, such as LLama 3.1, DeepSeek R1, or Mistral. Theoretically, Nextcloud Assistant can work with any service that uses an OpenAI-style API. Nextcloud, however, won't guarantee that the client will work perfectly with such services.

While the technology can use proprietary AI tools on its backend, Nextcloud Assistant's LLMs can be fully self-hosted. This ensures data sovereignty and privacy.

Also: 5 reasons why Google's Trillium could transform AI and cloud computing - and 2 obstacles

Assistant isn't just a standalone AI client. However, you can use it that way. Instead, Assistant's functionality is integrated into the applications. So, for example, you can summarize email discussions, get suggestions while writing a document, transcribe and translate chat messages, and create images. In short, the technology does it all. 

As customer Dirk Schr?dter, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein's minister of digitization, said in a statement: "We will make AI services available to colleagues in the state administration directly at the workplace. We want to drive the development of digitally sovereign and open solutions in addition to using existing AI services such as ChatGPT." 

Across the Hub, this new release brings significant security improvements, including end-to-end encryption for web access to encrypted files and video calls. These enhancements better protect sensitive communications across web, desktop, and mobile platforms.

Also: The best open-source AI models: All your free-to-use options explained

The Hub also offers platform-wide performance improvements and thousands of tweaks to improve user experience and stability across all apps. In particular, I've noticed its file-upload speeds have greatly improved. The file manager also enables you to convert files from one format to another without requiring an external application. As someone who often switches graphic files from PNG and similar to JPEG, that's pretty handy. 

The update introduces smarter team sharing with Team folders and Teams in Tables. You can also now schedule meetings directly in Nextcloud Talk.

Put it all together and what do you get with Hub? A do-it-yourself cloud program that's good for anyone or any office.

Also: How to easily use Cloudflare's secure DNS on your Mac and why it even matters

As Nextcloud's CEO and founder, Frank Karlitschek, said in an online press conference: "Hub 10 proves that open source can deliver innovative, privacy-first solutions that meet the needs of modern organizations. It's time to stop doubting and start benefiting from open-source innovation."

There's only one rub. While the promise is great, in my experience, trying to install Hub 10 was problematic. While some elements -- such as Nextcloud File -- were installed without a hitch and work fine, others have not been installed properly on my Rocky Linux and SUSE Linux servers. I also had this issue with a Hub upgrade, where I encountered serious code dependency issues with LDAP, MariaDB, and PHP. I'm not the only one to have struggled.  

At this point, I'd recommend waiting for the first point release before installing Hub on an existing NextCloud Hub server. Of course, if you'd rather let someone else run Nextcloud Hub for you, numerous Nextcloud service providers can worry about the technical details.

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