Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at 💬 Talk (Chat & Video).

So let’s set the scene. If you’ve ever wondered why NZRT isn’t using Slack for team chat or Zoom for video calls, this episode answers that question. The answer is Nextcloud Talk — a secure, self-hosted communication platform that lives entirely on NZRT’s own infrastructure. No third-party servers, no external subscriptions, and no data leaving the building, so to speak.

Nextcloud Talk covers the full range of communication you’d expect from any modern team tool. You’ve got direct messages for one-on-one encrypted conversations, group chats for teams, projects, or topics, and video and audio calls that can handle up to one hundred participants at a time. Those video calls run on WebRTC, which is an open, encrypted standard, so your calls are protected end to end. Beyond that, you can share your screen during calls — either your whole desktop or just a specific window — and you can record calls for later review. Notifications are covered too, whether that’s desktop alerts, email, or mobile push notifications.

Now let’s talk about how NZRT actually organises its channels in Talk. There are a few different types you’ll encounter. First, you have persistent channels — these are the always-on rooms that the whole team uses day to day. Think of channels for general conversation, team-wide announcements, and a dedicated tech channel. Then you have project-specific channels, which are spun up for focused work — things like a channel for a Dolibarr deployment, another for a WordPress redesign project, or one specifically for Nextcloud administration tasks. Third, you have direct messages, which are just your standard private one-on-one conversations. And finally, there are read-only channels, which are used for announcements — only the admin account, xc, can post in those, so they stay clean and authoritative.

Now, let’s look at how Talk is configured for NZRT’s specific needs. The settings used here cover a few important areas. The maximum number of participants in a call is set to fifty. Public calls are required to have a password before anyone can join. Call recording is switched on automatically — this is tied to NZRT’s Electronic Document Management requirements, meaning recordings are kept as part of the organisation’s compliance record. And speaking of compliance, recordings aren’t kept forever — they’re set to automatically delete after ninety days, keeping the archive manageable without losing anything that’s needed for audit purposes.

That combination of auto-record and timed expiry is worth understanding because it’s not just a housekeeping measure. The EDM function at NZRT — handled by the ema role — is responsible for records retention, and Talk feeds directly into that workflow. When a call finishes, the recording doesn’t just sit in someone’s downloads folder. It integrates with Nextcloud’s archival system, so it’s stored, managed, and eventually disposed of according to the retention policy. That’s a level of record-keeping that most external video platforms can’t give you without paying for enterprise add-ons.

And that brings us to the bigger picture of why Talk exists in the NZRT stack at all. Every Slack message on an external platform and every Zoom call lives on someone else’s server. For a consultancy that takes data sovereignty seriously, that’s a problem. By running Talk on NZRT’s own data centre infrastructure, all communications stay internal. There are no licensing fees for Slack seats or Zoom licences, and there’s no dependency on a third-party service going down or changing its pricing model. It’s a deliberate choice to own the stack.

If you want to explore related areas, the wiki connects Talk to a few other topics worth knowing about. The Collaboration Overview gives you the broader picture of how NZRT’s tools fit together. The Users and Groups page explains how access is managed across Nextcloud, which naturally affects who can join which Talk channels. And the Email and CalDAV CardDAV note covers the other communication channels that sit alongside Talk in the stack.

So to summarise what you’ve learned today: Nextcloud Talk is NZRT’s all-in-one, self-hosted replacement for Slack and Zoom. It supports direct messages, group channels, encrypted video calls for up to one hundred people, screen sharing, and call recording. NZRT’s channels are organised into persistent team rooms, project-specific rooms, direct messages, and read-only announcement channels. Calls are configured to require passwords, auto-record for compliance, and delete recordings after ninety days. And the whole system feeds into the ema role’s records retention workflow, keeping NZRT audit-ready without relying on any external platform.

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