The upcoming major release of Nextcloud Talk will include improvements for teams collaborating remotely, including easy document sharing with drag’n’drop, in-call collaborative document editing and significant modifications to facilitate calls with more participants.

Nextcloud recently announced the availability of its first release candidate of Talk 9; the final release is expected in about two weeks.

Most of the improvements in the area of performance and scalability have been backported to the stable Talk 8 series, making them available to users right now.

Highlights of the Talk 9 release:

• Smarter integration of document handling with introduction of drag’n’drop and of files in a chat, viewing or collaboratively editing documents in a call or chat and an option for users to decide where shared documents are stored
• Grid view option, scrolling participant list in normal view, and manual selection of ‘promoted’ speaker
• Automatic video quality adjustments to reduce the load on client devices and network
• Mobile apps introduce offline support, a big user interface rewrite in the Android app and accessibility and usability improvements for iOS.

The release also features back-end clustering to improve the scalability of server setup, improved connection management and error handling, improved handling of adding participants, the ability for moderators to turn off microphones of participants and the ability to limit creating conversations to a specific group.