Nextcloud Desktop Client MSI released, for paying customers only?!

You are saving about 8-10k€ support cost per year, is that fair for a competitor of yours who has paid for the subscription to get this feature implemented and you get it for free? Or businesses could contribute more to the community and could have implemented a feature themselves.

However, I thought back to when Nextcloud and ownCloud separated. One important reason for me was that with Nextcloud everything was freely available. ownCloud had a few features they considered to be enterprise (they still do). Why shouldn’t I use or want the file firewall or some external authentication. It’s not up to a company to decide whether I need something. Slowly more and more features are for enterprise users, e.g. you want to use collabora, perfect you run some test and then you roll out the solution just to find out they put a limit on it?

I use a lot of open source software without limits and I neither paid anything nor did any substantial contribution. Apache doesn’t limit the number of virtual hosts or domain names, and there is tons of other software I can fully use without workarounds and without limits. If you build a company around such as solution, I think it takes courage to offer it for free and only trust on your service knowing that many will use it for free even though some could afford to pay for it.

As a government entity, we don’t have competitors per se. Also, although I am supporting ~300 users in our environment, our budget is very tight. We would not have a cloud solution if we had to pay 8-10k€ support cost per year.

You do make some interesting points though that I would be interested to hear more about. You mentioned enterprise only features of Owncloud that informed your decision to go with Nextcloud. Could you elaborate on what those limitations were? I am currently in the process of deploying Owncloud on a virtual machine so that I can migrate our users off of Nextcloud and I hope I’m not setting myself up for more problems, but the fact that they make an .msi installer that is freely available is a huge win for Owncloud in an environment that will otherwise require manual client updates.

For starters, you will have fun with updating your Owncloud server alone with every release all the time. As for “enterprise” features, you can take a look at their “Marketplace” which ones are for enterprise users only. Two reasons for a lot of trouble with Owncloud that were heavily improved by Nextcloud.

At the time it was the file firewall, file drop, external storage (I think as primary storage). I don’t know today, they should have some overview on their website. But the problem was which solution to go with, and I didn’t want a solution where they perhaps have a nice feature but just for enterprise users.
The same for seafile, if you want a complete feature list, you need the pro version that is free up to 3 users.

Ironic, isn’t it? I did have a look at their enterprise only features, and there are some features that I would consider nice to have. Namely:

  • External storage on windows shares
  • Ransomware protection
  • Auditing

Unless I am misinterpreting what I’m seeing, file drop is possible in the community edition now, but I will test to confirm later on today. While the features I listed above would be nice to have, I’m not actually using them on our current Nextcloud instance. We are using filedrop, so it would be a shame to lose that capability.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. I had a look at the instructions here:

https://doc.owncloud.com/server/admin_manual/maintenance/manual_upgrade.html

It doesn’t look as easy as the Nextcloud updater, but at least I would have total control over updates. It seems control over updates is becoming an enterprise feature of Nextcloud, so I’m not sure I would chalk the Nextcloud update process up as a win for Nextcloud. I will have my Owncloud instance up and running later on today and will begin testing. It’s possible I will find that the update process is more cumbersome than I anticipate, but I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which manually updating the server is more cumbersome than manually updating clients on user PCs.

That was and is indeed the way you had/have to upgrade Owncloud. If you run some additional apps it gets especially funny. Or, if you use packages for distributions you are in for a nasty surprise too many times.

I did not say there aren’t flaws in existence, just that it became much better than it was in the past. More fine-grained options and a polish for the updater are definitely something that should be improved.

What exactly do you want to archive with an MSI-based updater? The Owncloud client cannot set any advanced options like doing complete account setup if the documentation is correct. Deploying the Nextcloud client can be done using the *.exe file and applying the /s (silent) option, it works perfectly with Manageengine Desktopcentral for example. SCCM should be able to do the same:

https://www.pelegit.co.il/deploy-exe-file-using-sccm/

Anyway, if you are a government entity you are probably eligible for a heavy discount anyway (like for all your Microsoft products). FLOSS software also needs to live from something, so supporting them so they can fix your problems is surely not a bad idea.

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I agree with you on principle, but we have no money in our budget for a private cloud. If we were unable to use a free open source solution, we would not have a private cloud.

This looks promising. I will give it a try. I personally only have experience with deploying .msi installers through group policy, but this looks like a potentially workable solution. Thank you for the link.

I had hoped this solution would work, but I didn’t realize that we don’t have a license for System Center and it is very expensive. Back to the drawing board… :frowning:

How do you deploy your software then? Just FYI Manageengine Desktopcentral is free for up to 25 users. There is also Chocolatey (basically a Windows package management system like almost all Linux distributions have).

Well… if your organization is not willing to get any paid support, than they leave this to you - the administrator of this setup, congrats!

You can also educate yourself about how to build a msi package yourself. This will also cost time and depending on the amount of work you’ll need to put into that, your organization may be better off to go ahead and purchase some kind of support.

Organizations need to understand that they either:

  • have the knowledge and skills themselves
  • get the needed assistance/support from a vendor

if they intend to utilize a free product in a way, that makes it become critical to their infrastructure. NC is no exception in this regard. Free and OpenSoure never meant, that you can demand anything from the makers of that product, other than to be able to use their product freely.

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“Free and OpenSource never meant, that you can demand anything from the makers of that product, other than to be able to use their product freely.”

While your definition of Free and Open Source is incorrect, what you describe is really all I am trying to do. Is the Nextcloud desktop client not Free and Open Source? Are there not community contributions to the desktop client? If so, this is not made clear on the Nextcloud website, as far as I have seen. If I am wrong please show me.

This combination screams BS

  • government entity
  • zero budget
  • MS AD infrastructure
  • DIY cloud tech rollout
  • Open Source “expertise”
  • “b!tching” about being tricked into believing everything will be free (as in beer)

Go ahead, switch to OwnCloud!
Don’t forget to change your username when you come back, so you don’t look so stupid.
If you still have a job by then, that means…

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Stupid post. So you’re implying I’m lying? Why would I do that? I never claimed I had “Open Source “expertise””, but in our very small IT department they do consider me the *nix guru.

I am not the one who described open source software like free beer. That was budy.

News flash: not all government entities are rolling in cash and embracing every shiny new Microsoft product.

Hi, here is the msi installer request on the Nextcloud Desktop github page. I see you found it already @TrinityDan :wink:

Simplest solution in your case could be to use the Owncloud msi client application with your Nextcloud server. I haven’t personally tested it, but I know others are using it for this reason.

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Thanks for the suggestion just! I have done a little experimenting with the OwnCloud desktop client installer, and the only issue with it so far is the ugly red unsupported message on install. I do worry what issues may arise with future updates though.

I believe I may be getting closer to a working install of the Nextcloud desktop client through group policy, but won’t be continuing testing until Monday.

Thank you for the constructive input. I think my posts rubbed some people the wrong way, and I will take some responsibility for that as I was pretty upset when I originally posted. I always appreciate community support.

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As I said - congrats, well sort of of course - didn’t mean to mock you… I know of enough organizations or business, that operate this way. As I said, this is all good, as long as you can tackle all the stuff needed alone.

And it is, it’s just not every aspect of it and this is totally reasonable. A company like Nextcloud needs to make some money in the end, to keep their business up, don’t they? And the Extra MSI installer - it’s just that, an extra. This doesn’t render NC closed source or un-free in any way. It’s something that you particularly want for your setup, but it’s not necessary.

So, if you need an MSI installer, you do have basically three options now:

  • read up on how to do it yourself and broaden you skills
  • convince your superiors to invest in support
  • hope the the mentioned MSI installer request on github gets some traction

There are tools to create MSI installers for Windows. Just a simple query brought up dozens of pages, dealing with that - and it’s nothing, you’d need to be a *nix guru for.

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It was one of the first features that were re-implemented by Nextcloud. Not sure if their community edition is then again inspired from Nextcloud. But for all this, I preferred to have a completely open solution and it is up to me to decide what I consider a “nice to have”.

You can still fully decide when you update and upgrade (you have always full control over all versions like you do have on ownCloud). For the updater app the number of release channels was reduced (there is a different thread for that).

I would be careful. In the past, the clients were very similar and for some time it was only the branding. Recently there are more and more differences and if there are incompatibilities, nobody will fix it.

Other idea, you could use the webdav mount with other software. The direct windows support is not great, there is cyberduck or mountain duck (also netdrive) and one more. Perhaps they have cheaper suitable licences.

However, I’d prefer a solution of Nextcloud directly. Even in the community, if you don’t do it alone and find some others, it might be doable.

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Free and open source in no way excludes the provision of extra services at cost. The NC client is free and open source and AFAIK is released and maintained in compliance with its licence. You can download the source and compile it as is, or modify it to suit your environment, or modify it and release your own version along with the modified source. Or build an MSI installer for the desktop client.

That Nextcloud GmbH creates an MSI only for its paying customers does not lessen the status of the NC code being free and open source. It’s a support function, added value work.

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This topic is a touch stale but to help anyone searching on how to do this or for those that have their nickers in a twist on this topic, I thought I’d provide a little how-to on creating an .msi and deploying via group policy.

I’ve tested installing the Nextcloud Windows Client v2.6.4 setup program that has been wrapped in a .msi and deployed via Group Policy with success.

What I did was use the free exemsi software to run Nextcloud-2.6.4-setup.exe with the /S option for silent install. That produced the file Nextcloud-2.6.4-setup.msi.
NB: I’m not promoting exemsi just telling you the recipe that worked for me so use your preferred search engine to find them or similar tool.

Once I had the .msi file, I followed one of the numerous available tutorials on how to deploy software via group policy. TBH, the group policy deployment setup and troubleshooting took 90+% of my time. The trick for me was to 1) set a group policy to wait for the network to be available before processing GPOs and 2) set a group policy to delay GPO processing for 60s on boot.

The result was the new Nextcloud client installed and upgraded the existing installation of the Nextcloud client without issue. The exemsi also added a Nextcloud-exemsi entry in the install programs list next to the Nextcloud client entry. That is to say, there are installed program entries for the Nextcloud-2.6.4-setup.exe and for the Nextcloud-2.6.4-setup.msi.

I didn’t test uninstalling any of it. I also didn’t look for any ways to automate the configuration of the client.

I hope this helps anyone searching how to deploy the client more easily and at scale.

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