Environment
We try to manage a church choir by a managed nextcloud instance. (NC Rev 25.0.5 Enterprise managed by IONOS)
We implemented a role based access model using NC groups as roles: CalendarAdmin has full access to calendars, ContactAdmin has full access to contacts etc.
The choir members and the musical directors have no NC administrative skills. They are using the infrastructure provided by the site ContentAdmins.
Core tasks not supported by NC
Event planning, eg. plan a rehearsal for tenor section of mardigal choir
Tasks
- address participants
currently there is no way to implement logic in address books, e.g. to select ({member of group “tenor”] and [member of group “Madrigal”])
Currently some vCard properties like “Role” , “preferred” flags or extended properties are neither accessible nor maintainable, even if they exist in the CardDAV database - address resources like “Room 312” or “red piano”
No chance in a managed NC, we have no access to occ commands or similar CLI to define resources - invite them for a specific date/time
Result is not predictable.
The user manual states “Only the calendar owner can send out invitations.” In our case that is one of the ContentAdmins. They have different jobs than “sending out invitations”. - collect the accept/deny responses
Result is not predictable. Some responses are “lost in space” - repeat steps 3 and 4 until you find a time slot, where a maximum of participants accept
Result is not predictable. Some participants do not get updates or new confirmation requests once they declined in the past.
Conclusion
Event planning in a (semi)professional use case is not possible with NC
Birthday Management
Task
do not forget a member’s birthday and congratulate during the next rehearsal. Job owner is any member of BirthdayAdmin group. The group has full access to the associated address books.
Situation
some of the ContentAdmins see Birthday Calendar(s). They have different jobs than not to forget birthdays
Conclusion
useless n a (semi)professional environment
Way out of the mess
- introduce an OCC wrapper to enable “Managed NC”-admins to use the https://github.com/nextcloud/calendar_resource_management
- make the contacts app support the entire RFC 6350 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6350 (as CardBook does)
- introduce logic in contacts app like “dynamic groups” (allow to place logic into group membership fields) or “virtual address books” as used by CardBook
- make contact groups be invitable for events
- make the event management of Calendar App predictable and usable for non-calendar-owners
- separate ownership, permissions and functionality