With ownCloud 9 Arriving, Get Up and Running with it Fast
Earlier this week, we covered the news that the extremely popular ownCloud open source file-sharing and storage platform for building private clouds has just arrived in version 9.0 The release comes with many improvements, including full federation, letting users on different servers share directories and files.
You can move beyond what services such as Dropbox and Box offer by leveraging ownCloud, and you don't have to have your files sitting on servers that you don't choose, governed by people you don't know. In this post, you'll find some solid, free ways to get up and running with ownCloud. All you need is to download the software and take advantage of these resources.
A good first step would be to take a guided video tour to ownCloud 9 here. According to developers: "ownCloud is a self-hosted file sync and share server. It provides access to your data through a web interface, sync clients or WebDAV while providing a platform to view, sync and share across devices easily — all under your control. ownCloud’s open architecture is extensible via a simple but powerful API for applications and plugins and it works with any storage. Store your private pictures, documents, calendar and contacts on your ownCloud server at home, a rented VPS or use one of the public ownCloud providers. Access your existing data on an FTP drive at work, images shared with you on Dropbox, or your NAS at home--all through your ownCloud server."
And, here are our latest updated resources for getting going with ownCloud, literally in minutes:
The FLOSS Manuals ownCloud Guide. As we've reported, FLOSS Manuals' guide to ownCloud is completely free, and a good starting point. Before diving into it, you may want to gain some familiarity with what ownCloud is, which we covered here. The FLOSS Manuals guide is aimed to be a complement to the existing documentation at http://doc.owncloud.org. It has sections on how to share files, calendars, contacts and more in the cloud, and optimize security. There is a whole section on SysAdmin tools, which makes experimenting with ownCloud easy.
Leverage the Pi. In this post, you can get easy instructions for running ownCloud with a Raspberry Pi device. Very cool.
ownCloud on Linux. There are many good tutorials available for running ownCloud on Linux. Linux User & Developer has a good one here, and Ubuntu users can find an easy tutorial here.
Video Tutorials. For some people, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the good news is that there are lots of video tutorials that help you set ownCloud up in minutes. You can find lots of them on YouTube, including specialized ones that can get you going with applications in the cloud.
Twitter Resources. You can keep up with social postings surrounding ownCloud on Twitter, either through the official channel https://twitter.com/ownCloud or the community channel: https://twitter.com/ownClouders.
Forums. Finally, ownCloud has lots of useful forums that you can dive into for more resources. There are many specialized tutorials on the forums. Starting here is a good first step.
Go Mobile. Don't forget that there are mobile clients for ownCloud, which can help you get much more out of the platform. With these clients, you can remotely access an ownCloud server, browse your files, download assets and more.
The nice thing about having your ownCloud deployment in place is that you can access files and applications from anywhere. You also control the security of your setup, and you don't have to worry about security breaches. Hopefully, you'll find some good resources for getting started here.