Anyone find a hole between CRM, Cloud and DMS?

Hey guys sorry to here about Owncloud, but also in terms of self interest the reboot of a more community led offering sounds wonderful, to me at least.

Best wishes Nextcloud and after a couple of hours research looks really strong.

Anyway as I say I have only been on here a couple of hours and next port of call is to delete the owncloud bitnami stack and get NextCloud operational.
I have sort of been going round in circles for a platform that is Cloud based CRM / DMS and its really frustrating as for some reason all the software available seems to be aimed at specific niches and full of feature bloat.

I have installed Casebox which I really like but seems to be devoid of a community, SuiteCRM which I am still evaluating but maybe is to commercial focussed and CiviCRM which I just feel suffers from bloat.
I just want to simply connect contacts to documents and I am not even bothered about editing and creation online, but viewers and full text search are really important.
When I say simple things all I am talking about is metadata data where a contact can be added to a document so that in the contact view I can view there documents.
Even better would be to allow folder metatdata that is more than just comments and sharing.
Also that a contact can be a user and this will limit there scope of access.

So with me being a total Nextcloud noob I thought I would bring up a thread on really simple additions to existing apps and how those apps can be more interactive with each other.

I am presuming much of what I will say is either already implemented or has similar support in the community, but maybe others have some ideas on really simple, additions to nextcloud that actually provide huge functional gains with minimal work.

I always thought this with owncloud as it always had the apps but for some reason the seemed extremely isolated from each other.

Anyway as I say I am off to uninstall the bitnami Owncloud stack and run up NextCloud and I will be posting my noob opinions here if anybody is interested and would like to comment.

Cheers all.

Stuart

Many apps have a section here on the forum. For new features, requests can be found in their bugtracker. Normally all resources of an app should be linked in apps.nextcloud.com. Feedback is always welcome, to speed up the development, if you can help programming yourself would be the best, as a “normal” user, you can still help testing or work on the documentation, this way the developers have more time to write the feature you requested :smiley:

I haven’t done any dev for ages and only poke my head into the IT world when requested.

But yeah I might spend a bit of time with Owncloud as I hold the new community importance of more worth than what I call psuedo opensource.
Really liking what I have seen so far.

If I was a developer the first thing I would do is allow contexts with the nextant full text search.
Surely where you currently are in the owncloud folder system should set the solr context.

I have just been playing with nextant and been mega impressed but with some experience of populated document repositories I know its going to be rendered practically useless if it only returns results from the full repository or index.
If you get a big repository with a lot of documents it will probably be easier to use the folder system or just rely on very distinct keywords and phrase.
My past experience has seen a common form of use of simple contexts and simple keyword searches to quickly return small subsets for fast search and view operations.
Again I will be having a look at this as an option to use current folder location as context could be part of the options and actually I think that would be a norm.
Need to have a look at Solr as I am presuming it does path contexts based on my Worlddox and Hummingbird experience of a time passed.

For me so far and I am thinking extremely easy to accomplish is just two things.
A metadata section for all files where you can create your own fields, just a simple addition to the current activity, comments, revision section, sharing and tags section.

If you could set a metadata field to be a drop down of app fields which contact would be really useful for me.

Actually I say me I am doing a bit of leg work for a community/advocacy centre and trying to find that perfect balance of simplicity and function.
Been looking at the usual rake of CRM apps and to be honest they are all too much.

I am think basically it would all just be nextant and solr and very little change to nextcloud.

Just needs a metadata app that can link to to other apps contacts is my first point of call.
Also when we add documents and nextant is enabled why does it not update the index on each addition?
http://yonik.com/solr-tutorial/ shows how simple this would be.

Also each info app could have a solar button that search for the context or selectable context of the current info dataset.
In terms of contacts if they could be added as metada data and stored in solr then on the contact page it would just need a full text search button and solr would return all documents for that contact.
Having the search input box would allow you to narrow that search to keywords and contacts.

Nextant is brilliant but it misses out on a load of goodies that Solr provides natively and my noob perspective makes me believe they could be achieved extremely easily without and need of core changes.

The path of a document is also a piece of metadata that could become part of the solr index and once more it wouldn’t really be any core changes its just basically a few minor additions to nextant and wow for me it would be hands down an amazingly versatile system for a wide range of applications.

If you are interested in the Nextant app, the best is to get in contact with @Cult, there is also a section about this app here on the forum where you can discuss this in more detail:

Try to keep one idea per topic and post in in the right section, if you mix up too many things, the risk is high that some information will be lost in the process.

Yes ! There is a lot of things that needs to be added to Nextant.

  • indexing other apps content like news, comments, bookmarks (already working, but can be improved)
  • options when searching is:deleted, is:files, is:bookmarks, is:recent, is:pdf, …
  • finishing the OCR part,
  • search from the Android/iOS/desktop apps

To tell you the truth, I started the project because I needed the ability to search within my dad’s library of cooking recipes (like 500 recipes at max.) and now people are using it to index their 100k+ documents. Good.

I never heard about Solr before starting Nextant and I am aware that I am only using a small percentage of what Solr can offer but I wanted, at least, to provide a descent (and stable ?) gateway between Nextcloud and Solr, so if one day someone knows something about Solr he could quickly improve everything.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time anymore to add all those small thing and I still have a list of bugs to fix :cry:
I don’t even have the time to start my next app Social Cloud … :sob:

Thats a shame, but what you have done is tremendous so many thanks.

I haven’t done any dev work or real sys admin for a well over a decade, but I will try and help.
I used to do quite a bit with an Indexer called Worldox for legal practises and I know how easy applying context makes the full text search.

What I am thinking its not for Nextant to do really and we need a metadata app that can be the glue for nexant to use.
The tag cloud is great but a metadata app for some would be much better.

I will bite the bullet and fork nextant and see how rusty my dev skills are as I may be able to create some routines to send the json packages to update/add/delete documents on the fly without the need for cron.

I really like the inclusion of the app store and really encourage owncloud to act as a payment gateway where they can take a percentage of the donation you deserve.
The community should encompass all and its much easier to have a singular centralised payment gateway where devs can provide, free, donation, contribution or commercial licencing.
I always get into trouble with that one but no mode should be excluded as time, expertise are valuable commodities and it should be purely up to choice of the dev.

I will be focusing on nextcloud for a couple of weeks, so if you need a tester or any help please ask, as I will make the time.

I really like the inclusion of the app store and really encourage owncloud to act as a payment gateway where they can take a percentage of the donation you deserve.
The community should encompass all and its much easier to have a singular centralised payment gateway where devs can provide, free, donation, contribution or commercial licencing.

I read something about that payment gateway on a future version of the owncloud appstore.
I liked that idea even if I would better appreciate a donation system. A simple button on the appstore might be enough. This is really something that would help the community (and me), and I am not even sure Nextcloud (as a commercial entity) needs to take a percentage.

They need to make a small cut for the upkeep of the gateway like most app stores do.
I am a big fan of a little by many, donation and free schemes all working from an app store.

Sometimes I feel opensource enforces a service only mode by provider because of the lack of various modes.
Sometimes that equates to deliberate poor public releases to retain service.
Just allow all and see how it goes, if someone wants to make a commercial app then let them, someone can equally create and alternative free or donation offering.
Its just a mutual benefit network and all contribution could be sourced through an app store.

Really good idea, they have provided one and they should expand on it to encompass all.
My current work for the advocacy centre is free, but if there was a donation mode I would of got them to bung you a few quid.
I am not suggesting NextCloud should go commercial but yeah the option should be there for all to share in a bit of mutual benefit.

Yeah just to add the feedback of maybe small subscriptions and donation modes also is very relevant feedback and the buy us a beer mode by many can also provide and support development and support.
I hope they look into all modes and also I have tried to push for a new type of licensing, contribution licensing and Discourse might very will be able to provide this.
So much can be done in a community not all is providing code, could be help, providing tutorials, even just giving good reviews.
Sometimes with opensource I would rather see a contribution/subscription licence that you have a choice become involved in the community in any form or you can just purchase.
Hoping they might just not copy various app store but maybe have a radical rethink how community software can also protect and help fund itself without enforcing payment.

1 Like