As organizations are looking to reclaim their digital sovereignty, IONOS and Nextcloud are building the fully featured office suite “Nextcloud Workspace”: a powerful Microsoft 365 alternative. As long-standing partners, we have the expertise to enable large companies and organizations with an all-round office suite as European answer to US products. Announced at the Nextcloud Summit earlier this month, this collaboration for digitally sovereign office software that meets the highest data protection requirements will launch in 2025.
To meet the rigorous needs of public institutions and enterprises, Nextcloud Workspace will integrate a full range of collaboration tools, including file storage and sharing, document editing, email, calendaring, video conferencing, chat, and AI-powered productivity features. Of course, this offering will be fully GDPR compliant and securely hosted in Europe.
Organizations can trust Nextcloud to deliver a fully integrated office and collaboration suite, thanks to the company’s experience in creating the world’s leading private cloud platform. IONOS, Europe’s largest cloud and hosting provider, is the ideal partner to ensure full GDPR compliance and protection from US legal exposure. Hosting will be managed exclusively in Germany, at IONOS’ extensive network of data centers.
I am not sure what this is supposed to be announcing. I have been using the hosted nextcloud from Ionos for a few year and I can say the experience has not been good. The nextcloud version is outdated by several years, the store is locked and the service minimal.
That being said it was the most competitive provider I could find for nextcloud + collabora as a service (not all provider include it, hetzner does not)
Though I love nextcloud and I switched to a new provider this month, the office apps still need work,the se patate server they require make the ecosystem difficult to read. Still overall I am very happy to see this kind of things surfacing, as nextcloud is a very nice alternative to gsuite or o365 with a lot of avantage. Just don’t go with the Ionos version.
Europe’s largest cloud and hosting provider
It’s the first time I’m hearing about IONOS. Are they really larger than OVH?
I’ve moved away from Nextcloud
It is such a pain to maintain and is way complicated
Not sure how long ago you tried it. But my first attempt at an install back in 2021 was so much more complicated than when I did it again in 2024. It’s been rock solid ever since. I use the docker all-in-one method, it’s pretty straightforward. When I went back to college, I decided to use it to organize all my classwork, and it’s perfect for that. I still prefer LibreOffice to author papers though.
I’ve found the docker version very easily to maintain.
Using YunoHost saves a lot of hassles
Intentional BSOD-coloured branding?
Is this just hosted nextcloud with collabora office pre installed?
Pretty much, though collabora is sold for a few additional euros/month. Not all providers for hosted nextcloud have a solution for the office apps (collabora or only office) so i’ve found it to be Ionos main advantage, along with very nice storage space for the price
It’s an alternative, but IONOS honestly fucking sucks as well, so I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about this.
What’s wrong with IONOS? Their VPS prices are some of the best out there and reliability has never been an issue for me.
I’ve had the opposite experience with their cloud services in a professional context. My biggest gripe is with United Internet, the monopolistic company that owns IONOS, 1&1 (an ISP) as well as the ad-ridden, flaming pile of garbage that are GMX and WEB.DE, two of the most popular email service providers in Germany as well as a constant source of pain for anyone operating an Email server. They will ignore common industry standards and best-practices, silently block your mailserver for absolutely no reason, not respond to inquiries and just generally make the internet a slightly worse place for small to medium sized businesses and selfhosters.
Ionos used to be 1&1 which had a fairly poor reputation. Not sure what it’s become nowadays. Apparently they haven’t gotten much better.
Oh shit
This will undoubtedly have a major impact against Microsoft and even perhaps Google.
AI-powered productivity features.
Everything is pretty sweet except ^the AI productivity features. Hopefully the AI portions are optional opt-ins rather than it being preincluded opt-outs.
I have a nextcloud instance and I can confirm that the ai features are plugins, and are opt-in (and also pretty cool, as ai feature go)
I actually want AI on my Nextcloud. As long as it runs locally. We’ve taken thousands of pictures over the years and desperately need some help in categorising them. Unfortunately so far I wasn’t able to find any reliable way to automate it.
Have you tried Immich? It runs local and is open source. I haven’t yet but was planning to soon as I have the same struggle
Yeah, trouble is that it doesn’t really work well with Nextcloud together so I would have to migrate all of my devices.
And in the end it doesn’t work much better than NC.
Have you tried hiring a couple humans? They’re much better than AI. And you help your local (physical or virtual) economy!
Yes, I love giving other people access to my private pictures I explicitly don’t host on Google, Dropbox or other external clouds. I usually pay them from the hoard of gold that’s stashed away under my bed.
Trusting humans (to any extent) is quite vastly different than trusting corporations, to be honest. But if that’s your jingle, you can always do the work with a bulk tagger / gallery assembler. No AI, nor environment killing, needed.
I think they’re looking for local “AI” anyway. Since those work directly on your machine, there’s no concern around trust (nothing leaves your device) and the resource cost is whatever your hardware uses, or was already using.
There are some concerns still with local models, such as any biases in the training data that was used, but for image classification it wouldn’t be that bad.
No. Anytime who has actually done MSP work understand that most businesses are not purchasing office. They are purchasing a compliance and technology and identity control plane that has just about every add on a business needs.
Personal office use has always been a nice secondary.
MSP?
The other person is correct. Managed service provider. The folks running the SaaS, Hardware and sometimes compliance.
Compliance being what is and isn’t allowed to run on a computer?
Managed service provider. Basically corporate IT.
Search your heart. You know what it’ll be.
I don’t even have to search. I already know it’ll be preinstalled/hidden opt-out based on current tech industry trends. :/
I’d usually say that “I’m hoping for the best, prepared for the worst” but honestly at this point I think I have 0 hope, and I’m only prepared for the worst.
Thats from the current nextcloud docs:
We strive to bring Artificial Intelligence features to Nextcloud. This section highlights these features, how they work and where to find them. All of these features are completely optional. If you want to have them on your server, you need install them via separate Nextcloud Apps.
I’ll sleep much better because of this, thanks again!
I wish I could upvote you twice but you have my thanks!🤗❤️
Goddamn✊💪💪💪
The one time I’m super thankful to be wrong🙏
Thanks!🤗What a breath of fucking fresh air finally🤌✨
It’s all just part of their addons, so you choose yourself if you want AI. You can even choose to have local AI, if you don’t want to use an external AI, which I believe is ChatGPT.
It would be nice if they could offer alternatives for individuals with prices comparable to those of Hetzner Storage Share (which is based on NC). Somewhat, I feel every other NC hosting solution is way more expensive per GB.
Hey, I had been searching for a reasonably priced NC hosting for a while. I even considered a VPS from Hetzner but somehow didn’t find this. Thanks for pointing it out.
Glad to have helped. The only issue I may have with it is that the web frontend feels a bit slow, but O mainly use it as a file sync service, so it doesn’t bother me too much.
Nice to see that the professionals have the same problems I have.
The Hetzner Storage Share lacks a lot of features that Nextcloud IONOS have. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Hetzner has an office suite for Nextcloud?
I didn’t check it, tbh. Unluckily, I need almost perfect compatibility with MS Office for my job (shared documents). You’re most likely right.
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Please tell me they’re not writing it in php.
Owncloud infinite scale seems, well, much more scalable
I might be wrong, but it sounds like hosted nextcloud, not a completely new platform.
Nextcloud is so slow and brittle, I can’t imagine scaling
I was in the same boat and therefore my nextcloud instance was mostly running for backwards compatibility with a few setups I have, while I mostly use seafile, immich and sogo. But a few days ago I updated to nextcloud hub 10 (I think that’s with nextcloud 31 under the hood) and damn does that run smooth. I was so impressed I got motivated to finally setup the high performance backend for nc talk.
I still dislike PHP, but nextcloud just won back my heart a little.
Why do you dislike PHP?
I don’t like the syntax, the runtime environment (which runs interpreted) and for PHP more than many other languages (aside from JS), a lot of code out there is hacked together horribly which makes me completely distrust the community.
Personally I stay away from anything that doesn’t have a compiler.
Not OP, and I don’t particularly hate PHP but I certainly understand why everyone else does. It had a ton of horrible issues that didn’t get fixed until 8. Just really awful stuff like a23+n7=30 , inconsistent syntax, It’s just had a lot of holes over the years. Post perl, It had the next greatest number of plugins and was reasonably rapid so it took off with the inexperienced crowd, But we ended up with a lot of code written by a lot of inexperienced people and a lot of best practices were eschewed. Most of the big software names that run PHP have had a constant stream of really bad vulnerabilities, more so than a lot of other languages. (WordPress, PHPBB, vbulletin, a million horribly written WordPress plugins)
Personally, in a pinch I’ll still do something in PHP. It’s so incredibly rapid and gives you marginally decent debug right out of the gate with nothing installed.
Nah, it’ll be CGI.
Cool, I’ve always wanted to get back into Perl.
I’m wondering what will happen to openXchange which ionos is using currently and is afaik also holding parts of. It does exactly the same.
Kinda sounds awful honestly.
I do use nextcloud for my small team. It’s the best of the selfhosted file sync platforms.
That said, it’s obscenely over engineered.
Who ever wanted a file sync platform that also does calendaring and contacts?
Who ever wanted a file sync platform that also does calendaring and contacts?
“Who ever wanted standard features from office 365 from their office 365 competitor”
Nextcloud isn’t a 365 competitor?
It’s filesync with contacts and calendar.
Even once you build in documents and spreadsheets, 365 at least has separate applications for that - its not a single overblown behemoth.
Nextcloud isn’t a 365 competitor?
You’re in a thread about it being used as one, so that argument is worthless.
I use Nextcloud for contacts, calendars, files, bookmarks, passwords, to do lists, Kanban boards, and recipies. You absolutely can turn nextcloud into a 365 competitor if that’s your jam
Those are add-ons.
Besides which, o365 is not a single self hosted php behemoth.
I’m loathe to extoll the virtues of 365. I don’t use it and never will.
Who ever wanted a file sync platform that also does calendaring and contacts?
Most O365 & exchange users? If you just want file sync, this isn’t for you. If you want a collaborative (online) office suite that can also sync files, it is. It’s meant to be able to replace the whole O365 stack, which includes Outlook.
You can also just not use that part, or any part you don’t need. This is basic NC functionality that has been there for a very long time, so why shouldn’t it be part of the package?
Sure that’s why I drive my 4wd anywhere i want to go - i don’t want or need 4wd but I can just not use that functionality.
Sorry what office suite is basic NC functionality that has been there for a long time?
Your analogy doesn’t make any sense, so I assume you really don’t know. So let me explain:
If you buy a 4wd, it’s always a 4wd, usually that means s relatively large vehicle. You might be able to turn it to 2wd, but it doesn’t make the car smaller. If you just needed a tiny car in all (or most cases), you can’t push a button to make it smaller. You always drive around the extra equipment to possibly make it 4wd.
Nextcloud is plugin based. Assuming this isn’t locked away on an instance like this, you can literally push a button and make that whole functionality go away everywhere. You can fully remove that ‘clutter’, if that’s of no use to you. They are offering it always, as it adds no additional effort on the hosters side: they don’t need to add gear boxes or whatever to make it have calendar & contacts. If you don’t want/need it, turn it off and it’s gone.
Like any analogy, it doesn’t perfectly map to the complex issue being analogised (?), but it’s not as absurd as you’re making out.
The architecture for plugin support is not free. Even if no plugins are active the platform is built to support all the extra nonsense.
lighttpd is the leanest webdav implementation i can think of. Obviously it doesn’t have sync and sharing and permissions, but it’s an interesting point of reference demonstrating how over engineered nextcloud really is.
If you’re a fan, and want all of this stuff bundled together then fine, have at it. As I said up top, I am using it but I dislike it immensely.
As far as analogies go, is pretty far off. It doesn’t hold even for basic behaviors of the two cases, let alone complex ones. A better analogy would be that you buy a (small) car that always happens to come with an included, free trailer for more cargo capacity. You can of course take it off and have a small car. And it’s also as magic trailer that doesn’t take up any space at all when not in use, but can also not be sold.
I’m actually not a fan, an am also using it somewhat reluctantly personally, though self hosted. I’ve had my issues with it, but an still using it because it solves some issues that are much harder to solve without it. I’m not using the contacts/calendar functionality.
But your original statement was that you couldn’t understand who would need calendar and contacts (in their file sharing app). There’s enough I object to in this statement that I wrote my comment. First of, in this context, specifically in their article/blog/whatever, it’s about nextcloud as a whole, not the fact that it can do file sharing. That’s what it evolved from, but not all it is any more, more better or worse. Secondly, it’s about an advertised alternative to O365, which includes the very common and almost universal requirement for teams (be it a company, family, …) to have events (=calendar) like schedule meetings with people (=contacts). Even if you work with just like 5 people you are probably gonna need that. There you probably want to share files, but probably more so it’s about the office functionality and collaborative, simultaneous editing of files. Obviously replacing Word, PowerPoint, Excel. And yes, Outlook (calendar,& contacts, also email).
This isn’t meant for individuals who need a few GB to store some files. It’s for teams of some description that need office like, cloud based tools.
Good lord. I’m not having a debate about the adequacy of an analogy. Well done.
Pretty much every car today IS AWD - a better version of plain old 4WD. So even your analogy doesn’t work.
Oh please. AWD is not “better” 4WD. 2 different things for completely different purposes.
you can delete the calendaring and contacts apps
No, you have to complain about them. It’s the law.
Well if I uninstaller them what would i complain about?
I don’t make the rules. If you’re on lemmy qnd nextcloud does exactly what you want you need to complain about it being “over engineered” or “bloated” because it does things you don’t need.
