Can nextcloud be configured as a pure group server?

🍱 Features & apps
1

As an IT administrator for a Club (a charity club) I setup a nextcloud server for sharing digital assets like files, calendar, contacts.

However after testing working a bit with it, I feel that the next cloud philosophy is not really matching with our aim: it seems to be a collection of individual users instead of a group…

  • Users have their own files (which can be disallowed by setting the quota to 1KB only)
  • Users have their own contacts
  • Users have their own calendars

What we need is nothing which is user bound, but all should be group bound: assets of the Club.
So users can see and add (depending on rights) only files to group shared folders, calendar, contacts.

So really there should not be something as personal data… we are not providing free storage to Club members, we just want to share data between Club members.

So as I see this, nextcloud cannot be used as such as a groupware server, due that everything is user centric instead of group centric: by default each user has its local storage, its own calendar and its own contacts.

It would be nice to have an option to configure a setup as a real group server, disallowing any private user stuff (no user files, no user calendar, no user contacts). The administrator can then make group folders, contacts and calendars which can be used by all members…

Could be a very good feature for thousands of clubs around the globe…

2

You can very easily share calendars, contacts, files, in read-only or total editing mode, with differents groups/users. You can exclude/include groups of these options. You can do what you want… I think you don’t know enough the sharing options of Nextcloud, who are infinites…

3

Indeed, sharing is not the issue. And this feature is used (I share the calendar and contacts and used external local shares for group wide data).
However I do not want that users can add their own local data (in a non-shared way).
Maybe in other words, it should not be possible to add contacts, files, calendar data which cannot be seen by the other group members.

Maybe it is possible to configure next cloud already like this, but besides the trick of the small quota I did not find any.

4

Ok. Than they open an account on another nextcloud for free e.g. https://nc.nl.tab.digital Do you disallow internet access? Are users allowed to upload private files to your club file-service? How do you deny that?

5

Denied by setting the lowest possible quota… (quota is only for local user storage).