Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at ?? Deck (Kanban).

If you’ve ever used a physical sticky-note board to track work — with columns for To Do, In Progress, and Done — you already understand the concept behind Nextcloud Deck. Deck is NZRT’s built-in Kanban tool, living right inside Nextcloud, and it’s how our teams organise and track tasks and projects without needing any external software.

Let’s start with how Deck is structured. At the top level, you have boards. A board is your project workspace — think of it as the whole whiteboard. Inside each board, you have columns, which represent the stages of your workflow. Out of the box you might have To Do, In Progress, and Done, but you can customise these to match however your team actually works.

Inside those columns, you have cards. A card represents a single task or work item, and each card can hold quite a bit of information. You can write a description, set a due date, assign it to a specific person, attach labels for easy filtering, and link files directly to the card. So if a task needs a document or spreadsheet, it travels with the card. Cards also have a comments section, which means your whole team can collaborate and leave notes directly on the task — keeping everything in one place rather than scattered across emails.

Beyond the cards themselves, Deck also tracks activity. You can see a history of who moved a card, when they moved it, and what changed. That audit trail is really useful when you need to understand the progress of a project or figure out where something got held up. Boards can also be shared with individual team members, with groups, or made publicly accessible — so you have real flexibility in how you open your workflow up to the people who need it.

Now let’s talk about how NZRT specifically uses Deck. There are five active boards across the team. First, the Marketing Pipeline — owned by pam and used by the Products team for campaign planning. Second, Sales Deals — owned by cas, used by the Sales team to track deal progression. Third, Procurement — owned by sun, where the Procurement team tracks purchase orders. Fourth, Tech Projects — owned by dan on the DBA team, covering system upgrades and Nextcloud maintenance. And fifth, the Editorial Calendar — owned by ema on the EDM team, used to plan and schedule WordPress and blog publishing.

To give you a concrete sense of what a card actually looks like, imagine one titled “Prepare Q2 Sales Report”. It has a description explaining the work — aggregating CRM data and creating visualisations. It is assigned to cas in the Sales role. It has a due date set, labels applied for sales, reporting, and urgency, and a file attached — a sales report template pulled from the Finance folder in Nextcloud. Then there is a comments area where team members can check in and collaborate as the task moves forward.

One of the biggest wins for NZRT with Deck is that it removes the need for external project management platforms. Tools like Asana or Monday dot com are no longer needed, because Deck provides the same core functionality right inside Nextcloud, where your files already live. For the Products team, the Sales team, and the DBA team in particular, Deck has become the go-to for daily task tracking — and it has replaced a lot of the email-based back-and-forth that used to slow things down.

If you want to dig deeper, check out the related wiki pages on the Collaboration Overview, the Files App, and NZRT User Roles and Agents. Those will give you more context on how Deck fits into the broader Nextcloud environment and how the different team members interact with it day to day.

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