FLOSS ecosystem vs. hubs like nextcloud. Which do you prefer?

[luckow]

We have a lot of apps. (I know, we need more - that's another discussion ) That's why we use docuseal, freescout, cubby, cal, paperless, hedgedoc, wekan, rallly .... For the most part, they don't connect well.
The other option is to use THE HUB aka nextcloud. Which solution do you prefer? Everything in a single “app” or the whole range of apps that provide good services and why?

[crazybrad]

@luckow Personally, I prefer the individual apps route. I was hosting a NextCloud instance with another provider (before I found Cloudron) and never seemed to use much of it. I had some of the features available through other applications, and nothing inside NextCloud was so outstanding that migrating was worth the huge effort. I gave it up as the cost/benefit equation was not working for me. Also I find that many software companies try to grow their main app into a "hub" and lose focus. Instead of doing one thing really well, they do everything, and when they can't keep up with all their competition on features, the just turn into a mediocre provider. Typically with all-in-one "hubs", performance suffers, the app becomes bloated, and I find myself searching for an alternative. And with everyone bolting on AI as a "me too" feature, the miserable performance and its impact on personal productivity is unfortunate.

But one area that I hope improves with individual apps is their support of OIDC and/or LDAP. Imagine if all Cloudron apps played nicely with authentication. One set of credentials would give access to all curated apps. What a wonderful world it would be...

[andreasdueren]

Same, I prefer dedicated solutions by now. For example the NC Polls app is notoriously unstable. I much rather use rallley.

[necrevistonnezr]

For me, it depends on the quality and the problem the app is trying to solve for me.
If Nextcloud focused on a few things and did them really well (and wouldn’t outsource them to half-baked addons), I‘d prefer an integrated experience: Files, full-text search out-of-the-box,

[small interlude: you wouldn’t believe how much time people waste in my office manually searching files. Why - in the year 2024 - is most of the focus on sharing files, instead of full-text searching, filtering, identifying non-OCRed files??]

mail, calendar, talk-app, online office - that makes sense to have as an integrated experience (these days, you actually can do some helpful things with e.g. Teams, Outlook, collaborative Word and Copilot which we have at work; but even effin Sharepoint does not have a comprehensive full-text search).
That requires, however, extensive planning, programming and maintenance/ support resources that open source projects might not have. If our company (5000+ employees) looks at new apps to buy, one critical aspect is programming and support resources on the long run. Even the best app is problematic if it’s a one-(wo)man-show.

[andreasdueren]

@necrevistonnezr said in FLOSS ecosystem vs. hubs like nextcloud. Which do you prefer?:

mail, calendar, talk-app, online office - that makes sense to have as an integrated experience

Yes that's what I do as well. Plus contacts. But already things like project management or document archive are better done with different software. I've been playing with paperless and it's looking really polished so far.

[luckow]

There is a (relatively) new FLOSS project here in Germany. It is called Der Souveräne Arbeitsplatz. It is a set of open source apps integrated into a “seamless” dashboard. SSO / harmonized user interface. Possible because the German government is putting a ton of money into the ecosystem.

https://opendesk.eu/en/
Youtube presentation (german only)

[jdaviescoates]

@luckow sounds promising

[crazybrad]

@necrevistonnezr Interesting (to me as a software developer). What type of files are you trying to search (unsuccessfully)? As a company of 5000+ employees, I would assume that there is a significant IT budget available so money to solve this problem is not an issue, but perhaps priorities are - or lack of a suitable solution.

[necrevistonnezr]

Just office files (docx, xlsx, pdf - some not OCRed…) - but: spread across a ton of Sharepoints with different access rights. This makes it almost impossible to search through everything

[crazybrad]

That does not sound like fun. This might be something worth looking into: https://microsoft-search.github.io/pnp-modern-search/