Network intelligence company ThousandEyes has launched Internet Outages Map, a tool that provides real-time visualisation of the current state of the global internet health, based on ThousandEyes’ internet Insights.

ThousandEyes’ map provides consumers, businesses, industry analysts and other parties with an insight into ongoing and recent internet outages that may be affecting the experiences of their customers or employees.

The tool uses data from the company’s “vantage points” situated around the world, which perform billions of measurements each day to detect when traffic flows are disrupted within ISPs, public cloud networks and other service providers.

“Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been inundated with requests from businesses, industry analysts and other various parties wanting to get a better understanding of global internet health during these trying times,” said Mohit Lad, co-founder and CEO of ThousandEyes.

“Today, we’re thrilled to release the Global Internet Outages Map to give businesses and consumers alike a reliable source based on actual internet telemetry instead of public rumor to help them understand what’s happening on the Internet at any point in time.”

The service was launched following a mass migration of employees from the office into working from home, due to the recommendations of governments and employers aiming to reduce to the deadly impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

This has caused an unprecedented level of internet usage, with Vodafone sustaining a 50% surge in demand for data services in some markets, while popular streaming sites such as YouTube or Netflix announcing that they will lower the standard of its streaming quality in order to prevent a much-feared internet-speed bottleneck. 

“Despite massive traffic increases — particularly across consumer last-mile networks — we have not seen a significant corresponding spike in Internet outages, which can occur when traffic levels strain network capacity,” wrote product marketing director Angelique Medina in ThousandEyes’ blog post. “However, there has been an upward trend line in outages over the last three weeks compared with the previous three-week baseline.”

The company says that the Global Internet Outages Map is available at www.thousandeyes.com/outages to anyone at any time, and also provides information in the form of a historical timeline depicting outage volume over the last 24 hours.

e-commerce continues to boom. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), show online sales accounted for 18.6% of all retail transactions in 2019. More startling is the growth of mobile channels: WorldPay predicts m-commerce spending will overtake e-commerce by 2023.

For retailers, evolving their business is the key to maintaining market share and nurturing customer loyalty. Research from Mintel published in 2019 is telling: 86% of Brits shop on Amazon, with nearly three-quarters (70%) of them buying something from the site at least once a month. 26% of them also have Prime accounts, giving them access to more and faster delivery options.

Speaking to Cloud Pro, Martin Willetts, technology consulting partner at Deloitte says: “The rate of evolution with consumer behaviours has been difficult for some brands to keep pace with. Those e-commerce organisations that are investing in the flexibility of systems, tools, and processes, are the ones turning the challenge into a real opportunity. 

“The biggest trend is how e-commerce organisations are transforming their capabilities, so they can adapt to support consumer needs while also scaling operations as digital shopping habits continue to proliferate,” Willetts continues. “Also, consumers are increasingly expecting full transparency from brands with regards to both the sustainability and ethical sourcing of products.”

Mobile retail channels will increasingly become the focus for consumers, as they consolidate their use of smartphones. The use of digital kiosks, self-service and cashless checkouts are expanding – all using smartphones as their payment mechanism.

According to a new State of Mobility in Retail Report from enterprise mobility management firm SOTI, 67% of consumers perceive mobile technology as the most effective way to provide a faster shopping experience. Additionally, more than three-quarters (76%) of consumers want in-store staff to use mobile devices to provide a better experience, and nearly one-third (32%) are unwilling to sacrifice personal data security to improve their in-store experience, revealing bold new insights about consumers in the modern retail landscape.

e-commerce is now a multi-channel, multi-touchpoint experience for consumers. They don’t see separate channels, but simply want convenience and speed when they are ready to buy goods and services.

Channel agnostic

The question of whether e-commerce businesses should become ‘mobile-first’ is now moot. The omnichannel has cemented itself as the model e-commerce, and m-commerce is based upon. Indeed, the distinctions are disappearing.

Mobile channels will become increasingly important as a commercial space. Estimates from GSMA suggest over the short term, 1.4 billion people will start using the mobile internet for the first time, bringing the total number of mobile internet subscribers globally to 5 billion. By 2025, the estimated figure rises over 60% of the global population.

“Looking at both commerce channels separately seems counter-intuitive to me,” says Ennis Al-Saiegh, CEO of Smarter Click. “The rise of mobile traffic and ultimately the improved conversion journeys that have had to be improved for this medium, has resulted in improved efficiencies if you treat both channels as a pure ‘commerce’ channel. Treating them as one commerce channel means your brand values, user experience efforts and marketing teams are all aligned to deliver an enhanced experience.”

Deloitte’s Willetts adds: “A ‘Unified Commerce’ approach across physical and digital channels that is modular, flexible and data-driven will be key to ensuring memorable shopping experiences. There is huge potential for retailers to achieve greater value from their marketing spend, seeking to drive customers to the business from any channel to any channel. Again, with a consistent marketing experience regardless of the medium.”

How businesses will construct their e-commerce storefronts is also changing. Headless commerce separates the design of a business’ e-commerce enabled website, with the IT infrastructure that supports it. The practical advantage is the deployment of an e-commerce business can easily be multi-channel. 

Speaking to Cloud Pro, Chris Adriaensen, senior manager of solutions engineering at Auth0, explains: “Headless content is effectively the removal of the end-user interface from backend systems, providing e-commerce solutions as a set of flexible APIs. Front-end developers can take user data and content to create far more dynamic and personalised experiences across different devices and touchpoints. 

“Headless e-commerce allows for more than ‘if you liked these teabags, buy this coffee’ and means content can be delivered in more effective ways, suited to the identity of the user. Power users might get a different experience than first-time buyers, for example. With new tech-driven experiences, such as Amazon Go-style smart stores and AR-powered dressing rooms for clothing still in their early stages, a ‘headless’ approach also facilitates a faster time to market allowing retailers to adapt to new channels, technologies and use cases.”

Consumers want integrated, cross-channel shopping experiences with their purchase journey beginning on one channel and often ending on another – increasingly, their smartphones. Supporting this level of integration is a significant challenge. Here, automation can help and will expand their influence as new services come onstream to help multi-channel retailers deliver their goods to diverse audiences.

New opportunities

According to Statista, 35% of American households have a smart speaker. What’s more, over a quarter, 26% made a purchase using their speaker last year. This rapid expansion of voice commerce is set to continue. 

Data has also become a vital component of successful e-commerce. With masses of information collected about the shopping preferences of individuals, the future of commerce is personal. Brands and retailers that can make personal connections with their customers and deliver new innovative experiences will maintain and expand their market share.

Finding patterns and value in the data being collected will become the province of AI. “Though most e-commerce companies today aren’t using AI in earnest today, we expect this to change rapidly over the next couple of years,” explains Michael Scharff, CEO of AI-powered conversion platform Evolv. “We see AI as a means to an end, not an end itself. e-commerce companies should look to adopt AI to differentiate themselves from the competition, create exceptional omnichannel experiences, and enhance their customer experiences.

Gartner predicts that, in 2020, 85% of customer interactions are managed without human involvement. It’s a trend that has moved at rapid speed. In connection with mobile devices and personal assistants, AI makes a powerful tool for shoppers. Finding products by visual search or making orders via voice assistants becomes hassle-free.

And no retail business can now ignore social media as a commercial channel. According to the most recent “Reimagining Commerce” report from Episerver: “On average, one-fifth of consumers have made purchases directly because of a social media influencer’s product post. Among younger consumers, that number is even higher, with 50% of Gen Z shoppers and 48% of millennials having purchased products either directly by clicking on a post or later on as a result of the influencer’s endorsement.”

Deloitte’s Willetts concludes: “A key technology trend, in response to evolving consumer behaviours, is the need for a flexible and adaptable Commerce platform – with ‘cloud’, ‘headless’ and ‘microservice-based architecture’ often being near the top of business’s requirements list.

“These trends have led both to a resurgence in custom-built e-commerce platforms using smaller ‘lighter’ SaaS vendor’s offerings – as well as some of the larger e-commerce platform vendors re-architecting their platforms regularly to avoid being left behind.”

How consumers connect with the stores they want to buy from will also be transformed as the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G expand and mature. Using the smartphone as the conduit to reach individuals when environments become smart and connection speeds have low latency delivers massive opportunities to all businesses no matter their size.

e-commerce is changing once again. Customer-facing websites and portals will increasingly adopt the headless approach, with the smartphone now the key battleground for consumer spending. Integration is the key to successfully navigating the next stage of e-commerce evolution.

Microsoft has outlined provisions for adding capacity to its Azure servers for key public and emergency services across the world as teams fight to contain the escalating COVID-19 crisis.

The company says it has been monitoring its services and usage trends 24/7 to ensure customers are able to stay online as businesses adjust to a sharp rise in remote working. 

However, Microsoft has said a cohort of key customers will be prioritised should there be capacity constraints, which includes retaining priority over new Azure cloud capacity.

With demand rising, higher priority will be afforded to first responders, health and emergency services, critical government infrastructure organisational use, as well as ensuring remote workers are up and running with the core functionality of Teams. 

“Over the past several weeks, all of us have come together to battle the global health pandemic,” the company said in a blog post. “We are working closely with first responder organizations and critical government agencies to ensure we are prioritizing their unique needs and providing them our fullest support.

“We are also partnering with governments around the globe to ensure our local datacenters have on-site staffing and all functions are running properly,” added Microsoft.

The tech giant has stressed there aren’t any cloud constraints at the moment, but concerns remain that the stress on the wider internet will increase as more of the global population moves online.

A host of streaming providers, including Netflix and YouTube, have in the last few days reduced streaming quality as a direct response to these concerns.

Microsoft’s brief warning about potential usage constraints with Azure cloud services may cause concern for businesses currently struggling to grapple with masses of employees adopting flexible and remote working patterns.

It’s currently unclear what these restrictions mean for businesses and organisations not deemed to be a priority, should Azure servers be faced with capacity constraints in any of its regions – it’s likely that some businesses could struggle to secure extra capacity if demand continues to increase.

The industry giant has said, however, that it would communicate any updates as soon as possible through its online resources and blogs.

Google has cancelled development of version 82 of Chrome and will instead skip ahead to Chrome 83.

Chrome 81, which was due for release on 17 March, is currently still in a beta channel and will stay there until 83 is ready to be promoted.

On Friday, the tech giant announced it had paused all work on new Chrome and Chrome OS releases as work schedules were delayed by the outbreak of COVID-19. On Monday, Jason Kersey, the director of technical program management at Google, announced that the schedule for 82 had to be dropped altogether to maintain stability.

“This is an update on our earlier decision to pause our branch and release schedule,” he wrote in a Chrome discussion group for developers. “As we adapt our future milestone schedules to the current change in schedule, we have decided to skip the M82 release to ensure we keep users safe and focus all efforts on maintaining stability.”

As a result, Chrome 82 is effectively dead, as Google will not be pushing its release to developers. It will no longer be tested or merged into branches or even be placed in beta. Instead, all efforts will go to moving the development channel onto Chrome 83.

Kersey added that there will be a further update later in the week with more information about future changes, which could be a regular update as the coronavirus continues to cause disruption.

Similar disruption has been felt at Microsoft, which has also paused the release of new versions of its Edge browser to remain consistent with Chrome. Version 81 was due to be released to developers on Tuesday, but that has also been paused due to COVID-19.

Both Google and Microsoft have had to force staff to work remotely, which may have limited their abilities to respond to bugs in new versions.

Google has said that security updates have been unaffected by the disruption and will still go through for Chrome OS as planned.

Cloud services have revolutionised the way we work, providing easy paths for collaboration over a distance and business-critical features such as automatic off-site backups and version control. 

However, potential issues range from not wanting to entrust data to the uncanny tentacles of global megacorporations, to very limited options for intranet-only deployments and the cost of per-user licensing for bundled services that not all users need.

Setting up your own cloud services can – in some cases – provide financial savings, but it will certainly provide greater control over the data you’re responsible for and the way your users can access it. 

That can be a distinct advantage when it comes to data protection and financial services regulation. Note, though, that you will be responsible for securing and updating the software that runs your cloud, rather than being able to leave that to a third party.

We’ll guide you through setting up open source cloud storage suite Nextcloud and Collabora Online, which adds online collaborative document editing to Nextcloud, as well as a few more common business cloud features. For brevity and convenience, we’ll be using containerised versions of the software distributed using Snap and Docker.

The latest version, Nextcloud 18 Hub, includes support for an integrated OnlyOffice editing environment on the same server. This is bleeding edge stuff, so for both this reason and because the OnlyOffice Community Edition it uses supports just 20 simultaneous open documents, we’ve opted not to use this approach for our tutorial.

Instead, we’ll guide you through setting up the current stable version 16 snap release of Nextcloud and the more fully-featured Collabora document editing environment on a dedicated server, as this is more appropriately scaleable to the needs of most businesses.

In our example deployment, we’ve given Nextcloud and Collabora’s servers each a dedicated VM. The required spec will vary depending on how many users you have, how much they need to store and how frequently they’ll access storage and edit documents.

A very basic setup – suitable for a small business or department of three to ten people – works smoothly with a single core and 1GB RAM for the Nextcloud server, and two cores and 2GB RAM for Collabora. The extra memory is particularly important here if you expect multiple users to work on their documents at the same time.

Unless you have very high storage capacity requirements, we suggest using an SSD-based system to improve responsiveness. This tutorial was written using virtual servers hosted on Vultr and that service’s default Ubuntu 18.04 image, but applies to any comparable virtual or hardware server configuration.

Nextcloud installation

Set up an Ubuntu 18.04 server. If your install image doesn’t prompt you to do so, create a new user, add them to the sudoers group and update the server. You’ll be logging in as that new user, rather than as root, whenever you need command line access to the Nextcloud server.

adduser username adduser username sudo su username sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade

Now, we’re ready to install the Nextcloud snap package, which packs in all required dependencies.

sudo snap install nextcloud

To configure your Nextcloud, connect to your server’s IP address in a web browser and follow the prompts to create an admin account. Congratulations, you now have a basic cloud storage server.

To make it easily accessible and appropriately professional-looking, we’ll want a domain name for it – either a new domain or a subdomain of your existing web address will work well.  

With an appropriate domain name registered or subdomain selected, create an A record in your registrar’s DNS management portal pointing at your new Nextcloud server’s IP address.

Now we’ll have to tell your Nextcloud instance what its domain name is. Log in to the server at the command line.

sudo nano /var/snap/nextcloud/current/nextcloud/config/config.php

Add your new domain name under trusted_domains, save changes and you should now be able to immediately access your Nextcloud from that URL.

With that done, it’s time to run through Nextcloud’s recommended server security tweaks, most importantly HTTPS support.
 
The Nextcloud snap comes with built-in support for generating a LetsEncrypt certificate, so just run:

sudo nextcloud.enable-https lets-encrypt

Then follow through the certificate creation process for your domain name. The Nextcloud Snap includes an integrated auto-renewal routine, but you can also renew your certificates at any point by re-running the creation command above.

Configure Nextcloud

Nextcloud needs to be able to communicate with your users for everything from registration emails to editing invitations, so you’ll need an SMTP server that it can send outbound emails through.

In this example, we’re integrating Nextcloud with a business that uses G-Suite, so we’ll use Gmail as our SMTP server. However, third-party SMTP providers of this kind may require some extra configuration on their end to work. In this instance, we had to reduce security to allow access. If users aren’t allowed to manage their own less secure apps, you’ll have to grand them this permission in the G-Suite admin panel’s Advanced Security Settings.

If you’re testing Nextcloud and using a standard Gmail account for SMTP, you’ll find the same setting in your personal Google Account Security options.

If you run your own mail server, you’ll want to create a user for Nextcloud and point it at that. 

At this point, you should add a recovery email address and ideally enable two-factor authentication for your admin account. Once you roll Nextcloud out to your users, you should strongly encourage them to do the same.

If all you need is online storage, you’re ready to invite users, but if you want to provide more advanced cloud services and apps, such as document editing,  you’ll want to add a few more features.

Click on your profile icon and select Apps. Here, you’ll see all the default features of Nextcloud, such as its gallery display for images, plain text editor and PDF viewer, as well as any pending updates for them. 

In the pane on the left, a category list lets you view a full range of official and third-party Nextcloud apps. There’s a lot here, so you’ll want to take a look through everything to see what your users are likely to need.

Nextcloud’s app library includes Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox integrations that can help users transfer files from third-party cloud services to Nextcloud, multimedia file playback and conversion, single sign-on and additional two-factor authentication support, web form creation, WebRTC-based video and voice conferencing, end-to-end encryption and real-time tracking of associated mobile devices, as well as more traditional office suite functionality.

For this tutorial, we’re going to add a calendar, task list, and contact management. Go to Office & text and select Download and enable on Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. You may be prompted to enter your password. Once you’ve added these and returned to the main Nextcloud interface, you’ll be able to access these via extra buttons that’ll appear on the interface’s top bar.

Nextcloud includes a simple integrated text editor by default, but if you need proper online document creation and editing, the Nexcloud Collabora Online app is an elegant solution. To use it, however, you’ll need to set up a Collabora Online server. 

Based on LibreOffice, Collabora’s features include full version control, commenting, collaborative document editing, and it allows you to create word processor documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Documents are saved in standard Open Document formats, and the synced versions that’ll be saved on users’ devices can be opened in any compatible word processor, although you only get access to collaborative editing via the web interface.

Collabora is available as a Docker image. As it can become rather memory-hungry if you’ve got lots of users editing documents at the same time, we recommend giving it its own server, which also makes life a little easier when it comes to setup and configuration.

Collabora installation

Spin up a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 server and update it. We’ll be expanding on Nextcloud’s official Collabora deployment instructions for this section and working on the assumption that Collabora will only need to serve a single Nextcloud instance.

While some previous iterations of Docker liked to run as root, which is reflected in the Collabora setup instructions linked above, you can and should use a normal user in the sudoers group. So, if your installation image doesn’t do this for you by default:

adduser username adduser username sudo su username sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade sudo apt install docker.io sudo docker pull collabora/code sudo docker run -t -d -p 127.0.0.1:9980:9980 -e ‘domain=subdomain\\.yournextclouddomain\\.tld’ -e ‘dictionaries=en en-gb’ –restart always –cap-add MKNOD collabora/code

These parameters include British, as well as US, English dictionaries – you can add others as needed. The path specified in the docker run command above must match the URL that your users will be using to connect to Nextcloud.

You’ll also need Apache to act as a forward proxy for the Docker images. 

sudo apt-get install apache2  sudo a2enmod proxy  sudo a2enmod proxy_wstunnel  sudo a2enmod proxy_http  sudo a2enmod ssl

Before you can configure it properly, though, we’ll need to set up TLS certificates for the subdomain it’ll be using. We’re again using Let’s Encrypt certificates in this tutorial.

In this particular configuration, the easiest option is to stop Apache before using the Lets Encrypt certbot’s certificate-only generation mode.

sudo service apache2 stop sudo apt install certbot sudo certbot certonly –standalone

Enter the domain name you want to use for the Collabora server –  we suggest using a subdomain on the same domain you’re using for your Nextcloud server. Remember to create an A record in your DNS settings to point the subdomain at your new Collabora server before you try to generate the certificate.

Certbot automatically sets up a cron job to handle the required three-monthly renewals of Let’s Encrypt certificates, but we’ll have to make a couple of modifications to make sure it stops and restarts Apache properly. First, test renewal, as it’ll have to stop your server.

sudo certbot renew –dry-run –pre-hook “service apache2 stop” –post-hook “service apache2 start”

If that runs without any errors, we need to create scripts for those pre and post hooks into the appropriate directories.

sudo nano /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/pre/stop_apache #!/bin/bash service apache2 stop sudo nano /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/post/start_apache #!/bin/bash service apache2 start sudo chmod u+x /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/post/start_apache sudo chmod u+x /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/pre/stop_apache See if these are working by running sudo certbot renew –dry-run

You can also confirm that there’s a systemd timer in place for certbot thus:

systemctl list-timers

We’re using Apache as a proxy here, so you’ll need to enter the URL of the Collabora Online server – the one you just got a certificate for – and the path to the certificates we created earlier.

<VirtualHost *:443> ServerName your.collabora.subdomain:443 # SSL configuration, you may want to take the easy route instead and use Lets Encrypt! SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/certificate.domain.here/cert.pem SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/certificate.domain.here/chain.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/certificate.domain.here/privkey.pem SSLProtocol             all -SSLv2 -SSLv3 SSLCipherSuite ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-G$ SSLHonorCipherOrder     on # Encoded slashes need to be allowed AllowEncodedSlashes NoDecode # Container uses a unique non-signed certificate SSLProxyEngine On SSLProxyVerify None SSLProxyCheckPeerCN Off SSLProxyCheckPeerName Off # keep the host ProxyPreserveHost On # static html, js, images, etc. served from loolwsd # loleaflet is the client part of LibreOffice Online ProxyPass           /loleaflet https://127.0.0.1:9980/loleaflet retry=0 ProxyPassReverse    /loleaflet https://127.0.0.1:9980/loleaflet # WOPI discovery URL ProxyPass           /hosting/discovery https://127.0.0.1:9980/hosting/discovery retry=0 ProxyPassReverse    /hosting/discovery https://127.0.0.1:9980/hosting/discovery # Main websocket ProxyPassMatch “/lool/(.*)/ws$” wss://127.0.0.1:9980/lool/$1/ws nocanon # Admin Console websocket ProxyPass   /lool/adminws wss://127.0.0.1:9980/lool/adminws # Download as, Fullscreen presentation and Image upload operations ProxyPass           /lool https://127.0.0.1:9980/lool ProxyPassReverse    /lool https://127.0.0.1:9980/lool # Endpoint with information about availability of various features ProxyPass           /hosting/capabilities https://127.0.0.1:9980/hosting/capabilities retry=0 ProxyPassReverse    /hosting/capabilities https://127.0.0.1:9980/hosting/capabilities  </VirtualHost> sudo service apache2 restart

Your Collabora server should now be good to go. Log into your Nextcloud web interface as an admin, open the Settings screen and scroll down the left-hand pane until you get to Collabora Online Development Edition.

Click on that and enter the URL and port of your Collabora subdomain – your.collabora.subdomain:443 – and click apply.

User experience

With all your apps up and running, it’s finally time to invite your users. In the Nextcloud web interface, click on your profile icon on the top right of the interface and select users. 

Create new users by clocking the +New user button in the left-hand pane then filling in the account settings you want to give them in the entry that appears at the to of the user list on the right. 

You can set a password for them, which they should change after first logging in, and inform them of it. Alternately you can leave this password field blank and have them use the password reset feature to create their own password.

When they first log in, users should set their language and locale preferences in the Personal info section of the settings screen, again accessible by clicking on the user icon at top right. Locale determines the first day of the week for the calendar, which is set to the US Sunday-first system by default, and the language in which days are named.

As well as the website, client applications are available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS. Users will be prompted to download these when they first connect, and they’re always available via the Mobile & desktop entry in the settings screen, accessible by selecting settings from the menu that appears when you click on your user icon at top right. 

Users can also search for Nextcloud clients in mobile app stores and link them by manually entering your cloud server’s URL. This section also includes links to information for syncing calendar and contact data.

If you want your Android users to be able to edit documents from the Nextcloud mobile app, you should use your device management system to roll out the apk file that can be downloaded directly from Nextcloud or have them install the app from the F-Droid store, as the Google Play version is, at time of writing, lagging behind when it comes to support for Collabora Office.

 

The mobile apps’ Auto upload options allow you to select specific directories on your phone to be automatically backed up to Nextcloud, whether that’s your photo gallery or critical document folder.

Assuming you’ve enabled the contacts app for Nextcloud, the mobile clients will be able to automatically back up your contacts to the service every day, and you can use Bitfire’s DAVx5 app for real-time calendar and contact syncing – once added, Nextcloud calendars and contacts can be accessed via your preferred app. 

Tasklist management for the Tasks feature is supported in DAVx5 via OpenTasks for Android, which users are prompted to install. Sync schedules can be customised as needed, with features including the option of only syncing over Wi-Fi, and everything works seamlessly in the background.

 

The desktop clients let you configure file syncing and create a default Nextcloud folder, whose contents will be automatically kept in sync with your Nextcloud server. You’ll want to set it to launch on system startup. You can also apply bandwidth limits and throttling, which may be helpful to those working from home or on the road.

Nextcloud and its broad range of apps and connectivity tools have great potential for any business that wishes to either switch away from or supplement third-party cloud services. 

For a more customised installation or to support large numbers of users, you may wish to build from source once you’ve familiarised yourself with Nextcloud’s systems, but the containerised versions of Nextcloud and Collabora are regularly updated and meet the core requirements for a small self-managed business cloud.

YouTube is yet to say whether the imposed low streaming quality across Europe will also carry over to its Live service, something which many businesses may come to rely on during increased demand for virtual conferencing.

The company announced today that it will lower the standard of its streaming quality in the UK and EU in order to prevent a much-feared internet-speed bottleneck, as thousands are confined to their homes due to the coronavirus outbreak.

However, when we asked whether the decision also applies to YouTube Live, parent company Google failed to provide an answer. 

“While we have seen only a few usage peaks, we have measures in place to automatically adjust our system to use less network capacity,” said a spokesperson for the Google. “Following the meeting between Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, YouTube’s CEO, Susan Wojcicki, and Commissioner Breton we are making a commitment to temporarily default all traffic in the EU to Standard Definition. We will continue working with member state governments and network operators to minimize stress on the system, while also delivering a good user experience.”

YouTube Live seemed like a viable option for many companies looking to stream conferences and events that otherwise face cancellation or postponement, given that governments across the globe continue to advise against mass public gatherings.

The company added that the reduced quality of streaming in the EU and UK would last for around a month and was an action taken in cooperation with governments.

Europen commissioner for internal market and services Thierry Breton praised Pichai and Wojcicki for the move:

“Millions of Europeans are adapting to social distancing measures thanks to digital platforms, helping them to telework, e-learn and entertain themselves,” he said. “I warmly welcome the initiative that Google has taken to preserve the smooth functioning of the Internet during the COVID19 crisis by having YouTube switch all EU traffic to Standard Definition by default.

“I appreciate the strong responsibility that Mr Pichai and Mrs Wojcicki have demonstrated. We will closely follow the evolution of the situation together.”

YouTube is the second streaming service to announce that they are reducing their streaming quality due to the coronavirus outbreak, following Netflix’s decision on Thursday.