Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at 📱 Nextcloud Apps Directory.

So if you’ve been wondering what apps NZRT recommends layering on top of Nextcloud, this episode walks you through the full catalog — what each app does, who at NZRT uses it, and whether it’s considered essential or just optional.

Let’s start with the core communication apps. These are the ones that keep the team connected day to day. First up is Talk, which handles chat, video calls, and screen sharing — version 17 or higher, and it’s used by everyone across the org. Then you’ve got Calendar for shared scheduling, mainly used by xc, sun, and fin. Contacts gives you an address book and light CRM functionality, and that’s in the hands of xc, pam, and cas. Mail is also available for email integration, though it’s flagged as optional and mainly relevant to fin and han.

Moving into productivity and project management apps. Deck is a Kanban-style board for task management — think cards and columns — and pam, cas, sun, and dan all rely on it. Collectives is a wiki-style documentation tool, used by xc and ema for team knowledge bases. Nextcloud Office integrates OnlyOffice so you can edit documents right inside Nextcloud — that’s a core app for ema, fin, and pam. Tasks and Notes round out this category as optional tools available to everyone if they want lightweight to-do lists or quick note capture.

For file management, most of the heavy lifting comes from built-in apps. You’ve got the core Files app, Groupfolders for setting up team folders with proper permissions, External Storage for mounting things like NAS drives or S3 buckets, and then the usual suspects — Trash for the recycle bin, Versions for file history, and Sharing for passing files and folders around. All of these are available to everyone, with a few like Groupfolders and External Storage being managed by xc or dan.

Now security and admin — this section matters a lot. User LDAP connects Nextcloud to directory services for authentication. Two-Factor Auth enforces 2FA at the platform level. Suspicious Login watches for anomalous login patterns. Audit Logging keeps compliance records. And Brute-Force Protection throttles repeated failed login attempts. All of these are core and sit firmly in xc’s domain, with dan also involved in LDAP and audit logging. On top of those, you’ve got optional extras: OTP for one-time passwords, and FIDO2 WebAuthn if you want hardware key support.

Integration and automation apps are next. Webhooks let you trigger automation based on events inside Nextcloud — that’s useful for dan and ema. The REST API and WebDAV support are built in and used by everyone for file sync and system integrations. OAuth2 is available optionally for third-party authentication flows, managed by dan.

For search and performance, Full-Text Search with Elasticsearch integration lets you search inside documents, not just filenames — that’s recommended and looked after by dai and ema, with dan handling the Elasticsearch side. Redis is the caching backend and is core infrastructure managed by dan.

In the Office and Document category, Nextcloud Office appears again because it’s that central — ema and fin use it for document collaboration. PDF Viewer supports annotation and viewing, used by fin, cas, and han. Text is a plain text editor available to all as optional. Markdown Editor is also optional and mainly used by ema and dai.

For CRM and ERP integration, the REST API built into Nextcloud is what connects to Dolibarr and WordPress. Webhooks can be layered on top for event-driven sync. Both are managed by ema and dan.

Backup and disaster recovery wraps things up. There’s a Backup app for built-in backups managed by dan, and External Storage doubles as a backup mounting point for NAS.

There’s also a short list of apps NZRT does not recommend. Nextcloud Hub is noted as already built in, so no separate install needed. Pricing Plans is a SaaS-only concept that doesn’t apply here. Custom Apps require vetting before use. And Third-Party Cloud Storage is skipped in favour of the External Storage app instead.

Now, the wiki includes an installation script — and rather than reading you lines of code, here’s what it does in plain terms. It defines a list of recommended app names — things like talk, calendar, contacts, deck, collectives, the Nextcloud Office package, user LDAP, two-factor auth, suspicious login, full-text search, audit logging, and groupfolders. It then loops through that list one by one, installs each app, enables it, and prints a confirmation message so you can see what’s been set up. It’s a clean, repeatable way to get a fresh Nextcloud instance up to NZRT standard in one go.

To zoom out: the whole point of this app catalog is to make Nextcloud actually work for NZRT’s specific setup. That means tight Dolibarr integration via the REST API, team communication through Talk and Calendar, and solid document workflows through Office and PDF Viewer. Every app on the core list has a clear owner and a clear job.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.