List of Windows integration apps available anywhere?

🏷️ General
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There are several Windows desktop users in our realm, and I have no idea which applications to recommend for providing an integrated Nextcloud experience.

Of course I am aware of the integration with Thunderbird for contacts and calendar, yet

  • the sync setup is not perfectly convenient,
  • some people prefer standalone applications instead of tabs,
  • look and feel / UI&UX of TB extensions are a bit old-fashioned,
  • and there is still a big number of users not willing/able to use any other mail client than the standard Windows mail application.

I have came across OneCalendar which can sync with Nextcloud natively, but I am still looking for proper Tasks and Notes applications.

As I am an Ubuntu user with GNOME DE, integrations are fantastic; To Do, Calendar, Contacts come out of the box, for notes I use Iotas, or for more complex use cases I have Obsidian (platform agnostic) installed.

The integration is seemles, I do not have to add address books, different calendars, or categories for the notes application. Are there comparable applications deeply integrated into the Windows desktop?

I spent countless hours searching for e.g. a capable, modern and convenient notes application. There seem to be as many Windows notes taking apps as there are Google chat apps now, but wading through this swamp is truly cumbersome.
Sure, there are many workarounds like “you can of course use whatever desktop app you prefer, just save your *.md in the Notes folder inside the Nextcloud directory” - this is a nice basic use case, but it quickly becomes unfeasible when dealing with a lot of notes in shared directories.

Can we work together to create a comprehensive list? Is it possible to publish a page on nextcloud.com like “endorsed/recommended 3rd party apps”?

Reasoning 1

It’s rather odd to convince Average N00b User to “use Nextcloud instead, very convenient”, when they have to click through several pages, check on apps.nextcloud.com, search on the forum, read the docs, and so on.

Reasoning 2

The USP of “privacy and data under your control” is great, yet we all know users do not want to leave trodden paths. Average Joe and Jane do not care about what’s going on on a server, they want to see their stuff on their phone/computer/tablet working smoothly and conveniently. I guess providers of 3rd party applications would also be happy if their efforts get endorsed by the Nextcloud platform ecosystem.

Reasoning 3

Aggregated ratings of said applications with a pro & con overview can help people like me, who are in charge of defining unified workflows across teams with different underlying tech systems. Best practices and/or recommended workflows definitely could reduce my time spent on testing apps within a virtual machine (as I do not have a Windows computer around).

After all, when searching on Google for apps for use case XYZ, I mostly got presented with information on Reddit. Why not here?

Merry Christmas, everyone! Fröhliche Weihnachten Euch allen!

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First of all I appreciate your motivation and would support a good comprehensive guide discussing specific use cases and applications with focus on daily usage and integration with Nextcloud. But I really fear this will stop at some point before reaching a good state just because there are soo many different requirements and it’s hard to cover all of them.

We have few discussions here with a similar goal

I don’t think “average Joe and Jane” are going to read ratings and reviews as you already stated they “do not want to leave trodden paths” but this will help the community and engaged users to make the jorney easier following some “crowd wisdom” and knowing how others address daily requirements. Feel free to start writing articles covering your experience - I would recommend to split different topics like contacts management, calendar, note taking into different topics.

For Windows I’m not aware of any deep integration of calendar and contacts and IMHO Thunderbird UI very good and I’m using TB with contacts and calendar integration into NC - but I know for some reason many people don’t like good old UIs anymore and prefer “modern” look with almost no controls and many useless whitespace… the only critics from me in terms on TB integration is the complex multi-stage setup process creating application pwd, setting up up each calendar and contact account individually - more straightforward “integrate all Nextcloud functions” assistant would be really cool.

I’m using Joplin with Joplin-server as backend for note-taking. Unfortunately back in time when I was looking for OneNote replacement NC Notes app was really basic and didn’t cover my needs. I used NC as sync target for some time Joplin made the NC activity history almost unuseable so I switched to Joplin-server as backend.

I think you have to ask Google… from my experience I often find this forum at the top of the search results… but this might be some bias or filter bubble because Google knows I’m visiting this site frequently. or maybe I use “non Reddit” search terms :wink:

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To add to the list of Windows integrations:

I am one of the co-founders of Sendent, therefor I added our products to the list.

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Referring to the topic headline: Desktop client itself of course does not need to be mentionied; is there actually a way to have the desktop client to be an identity provider for other desktop apps as it is on Android? I am sorry, I have not used Windows for ~15 years.

Using the web interface for Tasks is not the idea of my question. I was specifically referring to users who prefer to utilise desktop applications.

Joplin: Heck, I didn’t even think about it even though it is an Electron app! I had tested it before (but didn’t like it for reasons of personal taste), great idea to add it here! As far as I remember it comes with Nextcloud integration out of the box, right?
There is also QOwnNotes, which comes with Nextcloud integration and bookmarks sync, but I am not sure if it might be a bit of an overkill for Average Joe.

Mail client: I think the Outlook integration looks pretty solid, and needless to say Thunderbird is really cool about that. Obviously going through the description of the newer extension the configuration for Nextcloud integration is much more convenient than it was before, I missed that point.
I am testing Mailbird now as suggested, it looks pretty neat.