Nextcloud 35 — branded Hub 26 Summer — releases today, September 16. Same-day as the launch event. Nextcloud ships a major version every four months, supported for one year. If you run a community instance you are going to face this upgrade within the year, so it's worth cutting through the launch-day framing now, while the marketing layer is fresh and the operator-relevant parts are easy to separate from it.

The feature with an institution behind it: Teams

The flagship feature is Nextcloud Teams. Teams existed before — as groups in Contacts — but they were groups of people. Now a team is a workspace: its own page, its own storage space, and resources owned by the team rather than the individual who happened to create them.

That second property is the important one. Team ownership shipped for Collectives and Deck boards in this release: boards created by a team are owned by the team, not the person who made them. When a volunteer leaves, their departure doesn't strand the project. Any organization run by volunteers knows this failure mode intimately — the shared drive that dies because the person who owned it moved on.

It's built with Dataport, the shared IT provider for several German federal states — the same operational environment as the Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern migrations this site covered in August, where 44,000 mailboxes moved off Microsoft and €15M/year in licensing fees ended up reinvested into open source. That's the signal: teams-as-workspaces with team-owned resources is a government-scale operations requirement, not a consumer feature. If your fire hall or town office runs one Nextcloud that serves several working groups, this release is the first one where Nextcloud models the structure you actually have.

One caveat: admin controls for team quotas are partial — "admin setting improvements are expected in the next minor release." If central control is a requirement, wait for 35.1.

The quiet privacy feature: classified conversations

Nextcloud Talk in this release adds a "Classified" conversation preset, and the design is the strongest privacy-by-default statement in the collaboration-stack space this year. The mechanics are server-enforced, not just UI: when a conversation is marked classified (attribute bit 4, gated by the classified-conversations capability), the backend rejects with 400/403 anything that could carry content or metadata to non-participants:

  • no public links, guests, or federation
  • no message forwarding or reply-privately
  • no SIP, call recording, or live transcription
  • no bots or Matterbridge
  • no download-participants-list
  • forced "sensitive" status for everyone
  • image previews rendered as blurhash placeholders, not inline
  • auto-deletion of the conversation after a call unless a moderator explicitly preserves it

The config knob is retention-classified — number of seconds after a call before a classified conversation is deleted unless kept. The whole feature is documented in the Talk capabilities doc and the spreed repo (issue #18679 tracks the full lockdown list).

This is the same pattern as Schleswig-Holstein's AI assistant decision — the state that moved 44,000 mailboxes runs its AI assistant on its own infrastructure so nothing leaves its jurisdiction. That was a jurisdictional decision, not a feature pitch. Classified conversations apply the same logic at the conversation level: instead of trusting participants to behave, the architecture removes the paths content could take out of the room. If you run Talk for a board, a clinic, a legal aid office, or anything where "who could have seen this" is the question people actually ask, this preset is the first honest answer the collaboration stack has offered.

The free win: Euro-Office desktop

Euro-Office — the browser-based office suite with the clean-room OOXML implementation that TDF critiqued in August — now ships a desktop client (Windows x64/arm64, Linux x64/arm64, macOS arm64). Collaborative editing works across desktop and browser sessions. The editors are "available for download in the coming weeks."

This is free for operators: no migration work, no server work. It doesn't change the format argument — OOXML-default architecture, ODF as a supported option — and this post doesn't revise the August recommendation: Collabora Online as primary, ODF as the storage format, OOXML as the interchange layer. Euro-Office desktop removes the biggest practical blocker that existed in v1.0. It's now a credible secondary editor for .docx interchange work. Still not the primary.

The thing nobody asked for: 32-bit EOL

Buried in the beta announcements: 35 is likely the last major release with 32-bit support. The maintainers' position is that 32-bit support is blocking improvements and in practice doesn't work well. If you're running Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi 2 or an old Atom box in a closet at the fire hall, plan the move to 64-bit hardware before 36 — this is the cycle to do it, not after 36 ships.

Upgrade considerations

A few things to check before touching production:

  • App compatibility. In RC2 testing, some community apps were disabled on upgrade even when compatible versions existed. Audit your app list against the NC 35 app store before upgrading. Talk 25 requires NC 35.
  • Enterprise lag. The Enterprise build lags the community release until certification completes. If you're on enterprise, your timeline is different.
  • AIO users: upgrade via the AIO interface button when it appears.
  • Don't upgrade during a live event week — this release is brand new; let 35.0.1/35.0.2 maintenance releases land first. The September maintenance releases (32.0.15/33.0.9/34.0.4) include security fixes you should have already.

The honest bottom line

Teams, classified conversations, Euro-Office desktop — the features community operators asked for are here, built with the institutions that actually run this software at government scale, and the privacy architecture in Talk is genuinely new in the collaboration-stack space. Nothing here is hype: the launch video is on PeerTube, not just YouTube.

Wait for 35.0.1. Audit your apps first. And if you're still on 32-bit hardware, this is the cycle to move.