Replacing Microsoft Teams¶

Microsoft Teams is not only promoted as a chat and videoconferencing solution, but also as important collaboration tool of M365. Therefore, users can share files, manage shared tasks, knowledge, and many other things. This is possible because Microsoft Teams Sharepoint as the backend, so every Team is a Sharepoint in the background, too. In the Nextcloud Hub, Nextcloud Talk replaces Microsoft Teams as communication hub and is supplemented by Nextcloud Teams for project or department based resource grouping.

Nextcloud Teams are basically groups that every user can create. Users can then share everything they created with a Team, which can be folders, files, Collective (Wiki) pages, Deck boards or even calendars and address books. If a user is removed from the Team, they lose access to the items shared with the Team. Of course, you can also share Talk rooms with a Team to have chat & videoconferencing. The big advantage here is that no structure is enforced.

If a project communication takes place via email or a different chat, Nextcloud Teams can still be used. From an administrator’s point of view this makes many things easier, since there is way less default stuff created in the background which is never used by most of the users.

How to create a Nextcloud Team¶

To create a Team, head over to ‘Contacts’. In the left sidebar, you’ll find the section ‘Teams’ where can create a new one. You can add the basic details here like title and description and add members. Those members can be internal users, email addresses and guests3 . While adding external guests via email is possible, it has a few downsides: tracking who made changes is more difficult since public shares are created for each resource you’ve shared with the Team, and many modules are not usable without a user. Guest users can be created by anyone if configured; they will set the password on their own and they can be cleaned up automatically. You can find more information at https://github.com/nextcloud/guests#usage.

When adding users to a Team organizations can use the minimum principle regarding user management. In Microsoft Teams it is necessary to add everyone who might need access to even the smallest portion of the Microsoft Team as a user, since everything is stored in the Sharepoint and users outside are not able to get access to that. In Nextcloud Teams, every resource is just linked to the Team, keeping all the sharing abilities from the original app. In other words: A Deck board can still be shared with individual users even if it is added to a Nextcloud Team. Furthermore, users can share single resources to multiple Teams, e.g. for project management between two departments. A resource shared with two or more Teams will appear on every Team’s page. It is also possible to make Teams members of other Teams so it is possible to create a hierarchy.

This means for the access management that only the users that really should have access to the Team’s resources need to be added. If your project requires internal and public/external access, create an internal and an external Team, while the internal Team is a member of the external Team. This way, resources shared with the internal Team can only be accessed by users within the internal Team, while everyone can access the resources shared with the external Team.

Adding resources to a Team is also easy: they can either be created right from the Team’s page or from the responsible app (Deck for task management e.g.) and shared from there. If a Team is added to a Talk room, mentions are possible like with users. To learn more about how to use Talk, head over to the documentation.

Teams' lifecycle¶

In contrast to Microsoft Teams, Nextcloud Teams are more like messenger groups. Deleting them is not an issue since the data never belongs to the Team directly 7 . This means managing Teams is not an administrative task; it can happen in a decentralized way. If it is necessary to have a dedicated file storage for a Team like in a Microsoft Team or Sharepoint, a Team folder should be created. This, however, is an administrative task and is not necessary for all Teams.

Nextcloud Teams is designed to empower employees to organize themselves. Thus, managing teams can be handled more flexible than formal groups and SharePoint Sites. Users and managers can create and manage teams, while Administrators can assign a resource like a Team folder. It is also possible to use automations to manage assignment of resources. Controlling where data is stored is better done with Team folders, comparable to network drives in a classic Microsoft world. In Nextcloud, it is possible to share folders from your Team folder (network drive) to a Team. So although data is stored in department A’s folder structure, department B can work with it. After they remove the Team, the shares are removed and department B no longer has access. Files always stay in the Team folder and thus do not belong to a single user.

Deduplication of Teams is also easy. Let’s say two Teams have been created accidentally for the same topic. Your users just need to make sure that all resources are shared with one single Team before they are able to delete the other. No data movement or migration is necessary since no data is stored within the Team itself.

Different kind of Teams¶

Let’s look at the different ways Nextcloud Teams can enable collaboration. First of all, there is the very simple project Team with resources users created and shared with the Team. No data is stored within the Team; there are just shared resources. This Team can be deleted at any time by the Team admin without the risk of data loss. No administrator is required in the whole process; users can do anything on their own.

The second kind of Team is similar to the first one; however, here we replace a legacy company wide network drive or a company wide used Sharepoint filestorage with one Team folder which has been created by administrators as the central point of data storage. The Team itself behaves like the very simple Team: users share subfolders to the Team so all Team members can access the data. This is great if have organized a Team folder/network drive by department but have cross-department projects.

Then there are Teams with dedicated Team folders, like in Microsoft Teams or Sharepoint. While the Nextcloud Team itself can be created by the users, administrators have to create the Team folder and assign the permissions to administer contents in the Team folder. If the Team’s purpose is fulfilled, the Team folder also needs to be deleted by admins and a data movement is required to not lose the documents.