Nextcloud, run for you

Nextcloud is the piece of this list that non-technical colleagues actually touch every day. It is the shared drive, the calendar, the address book, the document you are both editing, and the video call — running on a machine in Stockholm rather than in someone else’s region.

That last part is usually why the conversation starts. A procurement questionnaire arrives, or a works council asks where the personnel files sit, or someone reads the transfer-impact assessment properly for the first time. Nextcloud is the answer that does not require a lawyer to construct.

What it replaces

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

The clients are the ordinary ones. Files sync to Windows, macOS and Linux desktops the way Dropbox does; 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 — PHP version, Nextcloud version, apps, PostgreSQL, Redis, object storage for the file blobs, nginx, TLS, cron, backup schedule. Upgrading is a commit, and reverting one is a rollback rather than an evening.

We size the 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 with the evidence sent to you.

The honest part

Nextcloud is not Google Workspace, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Real-time co-editing through Collabora is good but not as fast as Docs. Search across a very large corpus is weaker. The mobile apps are solid rather than delightful, and a badly sized server makes all of this worse in ways that will be blamed on the software.

Run properly, on hardware that matches the user count, it is entirely pleasant and it ends an entire category of compliance conversation. Run on the cheapest possible VPS to save forty euro a month, it will make you unpopular. We will quote you the former and decline the latter.