File sharing & collaboration

Of everything on this list, Nextcloud is what non-technical colleagues use every day. It is the shared drive, the calendar, the address book, the document two people are editing and the video call, running on a machine in Stockholm rather than in someone else’s region.

That last part is usually what starts the conversation. A procurement questionnaire arrives, a works council asks where the personnel files are kept, or someone reads the transfer-impact assessment properly for the first time. Nextcloud answers the question without needing a lawyer to construct the answer.

What it replaces

For most of the organisations we work with it takes over the whole file and collaboration layer: Drive or SharePoint for files, Calendar and Contacts over CalDAV and CardDAV, Docs or Word for documents people co-edit, and Meet or Teams for calls that do not need to leave the building.

The clients are the usual ones. Files sync to Windows, macOS and Linux desktops the way Dropbox does, and calendars and contacts appear in Outlook, Thunderbird and every phone, including the three Linux ones we like. Nobody has to learn a new way to open a spreadsheet.

How we run it

The installation is a NixOS module in your repository covering the PHP version, Nextcloud version, apps, PostgreSQL, Redis, object storage for the file blobs, nginx, TLS, cron and the backup schedule. An upgrade is a commit, and reverting it is a rollback rather than an evening’s work.

We size storage against your actual data rather than a plan tier, put the blobs in S3-compatible object storage at a European provider, and restore-test the backups monthly, sending you the evidence.

Where it falls short

Nextcloud is not Google Workspace. Real-time co-editing through Collabora is good but slower than Docs. Search across a very large corpus is weaker. The mobile apps are solid but unremarkable, and an undersized server makes all of this worse in ways people will blame on the software.

On hardware that matches the user count, it is pleasant to use and it removes a whole category of compliance questions. On the cheapest possible VPS, chosen to save forty euro a month, it will make you unpopular. We will quote you for the former and decline the latter.