How to achieve collaborative work with Group Folders?

Dear community,

I’m responsible for the IT of a medium sized NGO where people need to work a lot on shared documents. Now I’d like to move from our NAS solution to Nextcloud.

A typical use case is the following: Alice opens a spreadsheet that is hosted on the NAS on her PC. Then comes Bob and wants to edit the same spreadsheet on his PC. Now Bob gets told that he can only open it in reading mode to prevent him from editing. Alice does her thing, saves the file and now Bob can do whatever he wanted to do.

I tried to replicate this use case with the App Group Folders. But no matter what I did Bob was always able to open the spreadsheet and edit it. So when Alice saved her changes on the spreadsheet Nextcloud tells her that it couldn’t synchronize the document because Bob already pushed his changes to the Group Folder.

I know I can probably achieve collaborative work on a spreadsheet with Collabora or another web based document software. I’m also aware that people can somehow actively mark the document as locked but think this disturbs the workflow if you have to do it many times a day. I’d like to keep our workflow of storing documents in the cloud and edit them on the client with people not having to worry about desynced files.

Is there any way this is doable with Nextcloud? I believe I read every forum post and github comment that Google was able to dig up but still can’t figure out how to achieve this feature.

I even tried sharing the document via WebDav but still get the same problem that Bob and Alice collide. I hope someone can help me because else I’d need to consider Microsoft which I would rather not to :wink:

P.S. there seems to be some file locking but it will not prevent users from editing the same file:
https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/files_locking_transactional.html

Regards