Nextcloud has announced Nextcloud Hub 22, optimized for the modern, digital office. The release introduces user-defined groups, integrated chat and task management, an easy approval workflow and integrated PDF signing with DocuSign, EIDEasy and LibreSign.

With Nextcloud Hub 22 also comes the introduction of an integrated knowledge management application with the name Collectives. Collectives features pages and subpages to structure knowledge, and cross-document links to connect information. There is also a series of improvements in Nextcloud Groupware.

To relieve administrators from the burden of group management, Nextcloud Hub 22 introduces user-managed groups named ‘Circles’. Users can form their own teams and manage memberships in a variety of ways.

To facilitate the collaboration of teams, Nextcloud Hub 22 further addresses 3 different common workflows. First, this release integrates task management closer with chat, enabling the direct transformation of a chat message into a task, and sharing tasks into a chat room. Second, the common workflow of reviewing and approving a document is optimized with admin-defined approval flows which allow employees to request approval on a document and management to respond.

And third, requesting a formal signature on a PDF document like a contract or NDA can now be done directly from within Nextcloud. Three different PDF signing tools are currently supported: the well-known DocuSign, the European EIDEasy, and the fully open source and on-premises LibreSign.

Further improvements in Nextcloud Hub 22 include notifications in the app navigation, a series of security hardenings, integrated zip file compression in the Files interface and significant performance improvements to universal search.