Things Nextcloud needs to improve, from a Google Partner

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and this ā€œoutsideā€ perspective.

Yes, this was already requested. Personally, I think they should avoid building a new environment with potential vendor lock-in, so I prefer to keep an open environment, so you can keep your own mail server and just plugin Nextcloud for the file sharing features.
This does not have to mean, that there is a possibility to allow an easy setup mail server configuration with a management app in Nextcloud that can be easily used in combination with it. Nextcloud already offers to have external authentication, so you could easily have a shared authentication backend.

There are already apps for the file sharing and they are dealing with large number of feature requests and problems, Iā€™d like to address before doing something like that. On top of that, calendar, contacts use open protocols, so you can use more general purpose apps that specialize in this functionality. It would be nice however for companies to have a way to setup everything easily (and for private users as well), but perhaps without the need to develop everything yourself again.

With AIO and NextcloudPi, there are two projects that try to implement a more general approach to set up a whole system. There was a partnership with TrueNAS systems, where Nextcloud is supposed to be easily used. Sometimes user end up here, but I donā€™t know how well it works and how good the support from TrueNAS side is.

Many apps start in the community and are written just from developers for themselves. Some end up as ā€œofficiallyā€ supported apps that are supported for enterprise customers. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of open feature requests which sound really nice, bugs that need repair, ā€¦

You have floccus to sync bookmarks on Firefox.

But itā€™s clear, many things are possible but if they are difficult and cumbersome to set up, that makes it hard for not very passionate users to go all way.

For enterprise users, they have a few additonal services, I think they had some sort of MDM for android devices, for the desktop client, a plugin to use everything directly with Outlook, but thatā€™s only for business subscription and you have to contact the company for that.

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