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.
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.
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?
Managed service provider. Basically corporate IT.
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?
Yes.
Thanks. I didn’t know the compliance solution from Microsoft was attached to office.
That and policy enforcement are, I think, the biggest obstacles for Linux adoption commercially.
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.
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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.
Search your heart. You know which 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.
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.
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)
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.
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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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.
Just branding, market positioning
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
Europe’s largest cloud and hosting provider
It’s the first time I’m hearing about IONOS. Are they really larger than OVH?
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
