Nextcloud

Access and basic usage

You can access our nextcloud instance on https://nextcloud.ezdk.org. There you can login with your username and password. You’ll be automatically assigned to various groups. E.g. members for Echtzeit Members or mountainbytes-org for MountainBytes organizers. Through the group association you also gain access to the Group Folders for Shared files.

Groups and Teams

Groups are defined and assigned on account-level outside nextcloud (through lldap). Besides groups, nextcloud has the concept of teams. Teams are used mostly to collaborate in nextcloud collectives (which can be seen as nextclouds idea of a wiki). Teams are created automatically when new collectives are created. Both users and groups can be part of a team. On our nextcloud instance, everything is set up so that each group synced to nextcloud has a corresponding team and collective. This means, that if your account is part of the mountainbytes_orgas group, you automatically will be part of the MountainBytes team and the Mountainbytes collective.

Group name	Team name	Purpose	Note
echtzeit_members	Members	For all members of Echtzeit
echtzeit_vorstand	Vorstand	For members of the board of Echtzeit
mountainbytes_orgas	MountainBytes	For all organizers of MountainBytes

You can see which groups you are part of by navigating to your Personal Information Profile Icon (top-right) -> Settings -> Personal Info:

Which teams you are part of is visible in the Contacts app, reachable in the top header:

Under Teams in the list on the left, you’ll find all the teams you have access to. Everyone can create new Teams but we recommend against managing this yourself. It’s better to let one of the administrators know about the need for it. Then we can create a team which is managed through ldap-groups on account level.

In selection-widgeds you can distinguish between groups and teams as teams alsways have “(team)” appended to the name.

While in nextcloud, please use the teams when sharing a file to multiple people instead of groups. This way, it becomes a team ressource. It is also more easily manageable, since multiple groups can be part of a team and access can be dynamically managed on the team-level instead of adjusting access to individual groups and people on file-level.

Collectives

Collectives are nextclouds way of doing wiki-like collaboration. The Collective app can be accessed through the link in the header-menu:

In the list to the left, any collectives you are part of are listed. Click on one to enter it. In a collective, you can create a hierarchy of pages.You can create a new page by clicking the + icon next to an entry in the list. If you click the + on an existing page, it will create a subpage. These are simple markdown files, but collectives comes with a nice editor to edit them visually. You can also link to and embed other content saved in nextcloud.

All the page-files are stored under Files -> Collectives.

Other Apps

Decks

The decks app allows you to create Kanban Boards. It’s the preferred way in nextcloud organize Tasks. They can be integrated into teams by sharing them with one.

Forms

Forms allows you to.. well.. create forms that people can fill out. Questionnaires, getting Feedback, etc. The results can be viewed in the app and saved to a spreadsheet. If you want to get responses from people without an account on ezdk.org, create a new “Share Link” in the Form Settings.

Secrets

With secrets, you can create encrypted text (optionally secured by a password) which will be deleted as soon as it is retrieved through a link. It can also be used to share sensitive information with someone who does not have an account on ezdk.org. It is also the preferred way in which the credentials of newly created accounts are shared. Other used could also be to send people votekeys for remote entries.

Passwords

This is a classic password manager. You can use it to save sensitive information, credentials, notes, etc which should be retrievable multiple times. You can also share these passwords with individuals (sharing with a team does not seem to be possible for now). This can be used for example to save and share credentials to various systems used during events.

Add Email address

With your *@ezdk.org" account, you also automatically get a @ezdk.org email address which you can access through Nextcloud (or any other imap/smtp client). Here’s how to enable it in Nextcloud:

Open the Email-App

You should see the Connect your mail account screen. If you already added another email address, open the Mail settings and click + Add mail account

Add the following information:

• Name: This can be anything. It defaults to your displayName. This will also be the Name people will see when receiving email from you.
• Mail address: enter <your_username>@ezdk.org
• Password: The same password you also use when loggin to nextcloud.

Click Connect. You will get an error that the imap username or password is wrong. This is fine and expected! We used this step to populate the server parameters. Switch the view to Manual.

Modify the IMAP User and SMTP User fields, so that they only include your usename (without the @ezdk.org part). Then click Connect again. The Webmail interface should open. Which means you are ready to send and receive email in nextcloud!.

Mobile Access

You can get access to the files on Nextcloud through the official Nextcloud apps for Android and IOS available in their respective app-stores. But these don’t provide all the features of the Web-Version. For example, document editing relies on apps installed on your smartphone. We recommend the Collabora app which is based on LibreOffice for this.

You can add your @ezdk.org email to any mobile email reader with IMAP/SMTP support (which are most of them). Just use the same values for connecting to it as described in the guide for adding it to nextcloud.

Nextcloud App

The official smartphone app for nextcloud only provides access to the files stored on the server and file-sync options. It does not integrate the various nextcloud apps such as email, cards, etc. It also does not feature the Collectives app. But you can access and edit the Collectives Pages by navigating to Files -> Collectives -> Subdirectory. There you’ll find the *.md files that store the content. These can be edited in the app.