In cooperation with several European authorities, Nextcloud wants to expand its own collaboration platform Hub into a digitally sovereign office workplace. To this end, an advisory board has now been set up, which includes representatives of German, Swedish and Swiss authorities. In direct communication with developers and users, he will drive the further development of Nextcloud Office into an independent and trusted tool for on-premises document collaboration.

Nextcloud Office was launched in December 2021 in collaboration with the online office experts from Collabora. It offers extended compatibility with the proprietary MS Office document formats used primarily in administrations for many specialist procedures. To improve user acceptance, the developers based the new user interface on the current MS Office. In addition, there is now a new component, Draw, as an alternative to Visio. In addition, users can continue to use locally installed Microsoft fonts in their documents, which is often essential for correct display.

Where the journey should go

The Nextcloud Usability Team, in coordination with the Advisory Board, will soon conduct a survey on usage patterns in the public sector and use the results to prioritize further development steps. In addition to performance improvements, the developers are already working on a new feature: soon, users will be able to seamlessly switch back and forth between editing in the browser and the locally installed Office package. So if the online editor is missing a function, it can be used in the local product in order to continue working online afterwards. The announcement also promises better compatibility with Office documents from older MS Office versions than MS 365.

More and more European authorities are seeing their digital sovereignty threatened by the dominant position of a few digital collaboration platforms, which has already concerned antitrust authorities on several occasions, as in the recent case of Microsoft. In addition, some European data protection authorities are increasingly of the opinion that foreign cloud platforms are not suitable for use by public authorities. The OSB Alliance also demanded that Europe needs trustworthy hardware and software manufacturers in order to strengthen digital sovereignty.