Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at 📇 Contacts.

Nextcloud Contacts is our shared address book, and it’s the single source of truth for client and vendor data across the team. It supports CardDAV, which means your contacts can sync automatically to your phone, tablet, or Outlook — wherever you manage your address book day to day.

Let’s talk about what the Contacts app actually does for you. First, you get shared address books, so the whole team is working from the same up-to-date records rather than scattered personal lists. You can store custom fields too — things like deal stage, company name, and phone numbers that make it useful as a lightweight CRM. Contacts can be organised into groups, which makes it easy to filter and find who you need. And when it comes to getting data in or out, you can import and export using VCF or CSV formats.

Now, NZRT has four main contact groups set up. The first is Clients, which is maintained by the pam and cas agents and holds the customer database. The second is Vendors, looked after by sun and fin, covering all supplier contacts. Third is Employees — that’s the internal directory, maintained by han and xc. And fourth is Partners, which xc manages, covering integrations and external service providers.

One of the most important things to understand about Contacts is how it connects to Dolibarr, our ERP system. There are two ways this works. The first is an automated sync — Nextcloud Contacts and Dolibarr customers and suppliers are linked through the REST API, and a nightly task keeps them in step. So changes made in one place flow through to the other overnight. The second method is manual — you can download a CSV from Contacts and import it directly into the Dolibarr CRM. That’s useful for one-off bulk updates or when you need more control over what gets synced and when.

If you want to set up CardDAV on your mobile device, here’s how that works on iOS. You go into Settings, then Accounts, and add a new CardDAV account. The server address is your Nextcloud instance, and you log in with your LDAP username. Once that’s connected, your Nextcloud contacts will appear right alongside your regular phone contacts and stay in sync automatically.

Finally, a quick note on who owns what. The pam agent handles products, cas handles sales, and sun handles procurement. All three of them maintain contact records in Nextcloud, and those records sync through to Dolibarr where they’re used for invoicing and order management. So if you’re ever wondering where the authoritative version of a client or vendor record lives, it starts here in Contacts.

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

Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at ?? Calendar.

If you’ve ever missed a deadline because someone forgot to tell you about a meeting, or you’ve had to chase a teammate just to find out when a client call is happening, then shared calendaring is exactly what this episode is about. Nextcloud Calendar is the solution NZRT uses to keep the whole team on the same page when it comes to scheduling, events, and time.

So what can Nextcloud Calendar actually do? Let’s walk through the core features. First up, you get shared calendars, which means you can have team-wide, project-specific, or role-based calendars that multiple people can view and contribute to. Next, there are event invitations with RSVP and attendance tracking, so when you send someone a calendar invite, you can actually see whether they’ve accepted, declined, or are still sitting on the fence. You also get recurring events, which are great for things like daily standups, weekly team meetings, or monthly finance reviews where you just set it once and it keeps showing up. Then there’s CalDAV sync, which we’ll talk more about in a moment, colour coding so you can visually tell your calendars apart at a glance, and full time zone support for when you’re working across different regions.

Now let’s look at how NZRT has structured its calendars. There are four main calendars set up. The first is the Team Calendar, owned by xc, with all team members having access. That one is used for company-wide events like public holidays and company announcements. The second is the Sales Calendar, owned by cas, used by the sales team to track client calls and demos. The third is the Finance Calendar, owned by fin, shared with fin and sun, and used for things like payment deadlines and month-end close activities. And the fourth is the HR Calendar, owned by han, shared with han and xc, covering onboarding schedules, performance reviews, and time-off requests. So depending on your role, you’ll likely be a member of one or more of these calendars, each colour coded and kept separate so the right information reaches the right people.

Now, one of the really useful things about Nextcloud Calendar is that it doesn’t just live inside the Nextcloud web interface. You can sync it directly to your phone or your desktop calendar app. There’s a section in the wiki that shows you how to do this, so let me walk you through what it describes. You start by opening your calendar app on iOS or Android, then you add a new account and choose CalDAV or CardDAV as the account type. From there, you enter the server address, which for NZRT is the internal Nextcloud address, then you put in your username and password using your LDAP credentials, the same ones you use to log in to Nextcloud. Once that’s done, your calendar app will automatically sync your events down to your device. So any event added to Nextcloud Calendar by a teammate will show up on your phone, and anything you create on your phone will push back up to Nextcloud. It keeps everything in one place without you having to manually check the web app every morning.

If you’re an Outlook user or you use Apple Calendar on a Mac, the same CalDAV protocol works there too. The process is similar, you point the app at the Nextcloud server using your credentials, and you get two-way sync from that point on.

From a broader NZRT perspective, the calendar isn’t just a standalone scheduling tool. It connects to how the whole organisation operates day to day. If you’re working on a Dolibarr project, you can align your calendar events with project milestones and deadlines. If you’re involved in the WordPress editorial side of things, calendar visibility helps coordinate content publishing schedules. And for the team doing Nextcloud maintenance, having a shared calendar means maintenance windows are visible to everyone before they happen, not after.

For fin and sun in particular, who manage payment schedules and vendor deadlines, the Finance Calendar is a practical tool for making sure nothing slips through the cracks at end of month when things tend to get hectic.

So whether you’re in sales tracking your client calls, in HR managing onboarding timelines, or in finance keeping an eye on payment due dates, Nextcloud Calendar gives your team a single, shared view of what’s happening and when. And with CalDAV sync, that view travels with you on whatever device you prefer to work on.

If you want to dig deeper, the wiki also links out to related notes covering the broader Nextcloud collaboration overview, Contacts, and the combined Email and CalDAV CardDAV integration guide, which is worth a read if you want to get everything connected at once.

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

Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Collaboration Overview.

If you’ve ever juggled Slack for chat, Zoom for video calls, Google Calendar for scheduling, Asana for task tracking, and a separate wiki for documentation — all while wondering why your team’s data is scattered across half a dozen external platforms — this episode is for you. At NZRT, the answer to that problem is Nextcloud’s built-in collaboration suite, and today we’re going to walk through what it includes, who uses it, and why it matters.

So let’s start with what the collaboration suite actually is. Nextcloud isn’t just a file storage platform. It ships with a set of apps — Talk, Calendar, Contacts, Deck, and Collectives — that together cover almost everything a team needs to communicate and coordinate. And because it’s all self-hosted within NZRT’s own infrastructure, your data stays inside the organisation. No third-party SaaS subscriptions, no data leaving the building, so to speak.

Let’s go through each of those apps one by one.

First up is Talk. This is your chat and video calling tool — and if you’re familiar with Slack or Zoom, Talk covers that same ground. You can send messages, hop on video calls, and share your screen, all from within Nextcloud. At NZRT, Talk is available to everyone across all roles, so it’s the go-to channel for real-time team communication.

Next is Calendar. This is a shared calendar and scheduling tool, similar to Google Calendar. At NZRT, it’s used primarily by xc, sun, and fin — so that covers the executive, the operations side, and the finance function. It keeps scheduling in one place without needing to hand your calendar data over to an external provider.

Third is Contacts. This is the team’s shared address book, and it also connects to CRM-style data. At NZRT, it’s used by xc, pam, and cas — the executive, the project and marketing agent, and the customer and sales agent. If you need to look up a contact or manage relationship data, Contacts is where you go.

Fourth is Deck. Think of this as NZRT’s Kanban board and task management tool — essentially the replacement for Asana. You can create boards, move tasks through stages, and keep project work organised visually. At NZRT, Deck is used mainly by pam and dan — the project agent and the data and analytics agent.

And fifth is Collectives. This is the team wiki and documentation tool. If you need to write up processes, maintain internal docs, or collaborate on written content, Collectives is the place for that. At NZRT, that’s xc, ema, and dai — the executive, the email and comms agent, and the data insights agent.

Now, beyond the individual apps, there are some integration benefits worth understanding, because this is where the suite really earns its place.

The first is single sign-on. Your directory credentials work across all of these apps, so you’re not managing separate logins for each tool. One set of credentials, everything connected.

The second benefit is file integration. Because these collaboration apps live inside Nextcloud, you can share files directly from a chat conversation or attach them to a task on your Deck board. There’s no copy-paste shuffle between a file storage app and your communication tool — it’s all in the same place.

Third is a unified notification hub. Rather than checking five different apps for alerts, Nextcloud consolidates notifications across Talk, Calendar, Deck, and the rest. You get a single stream of what needs your attention.

And fourth is API access. The Nextcloud collaboration apps support automation and third-party integrations, which means agents and scripts can interact with these tools programmatically. That’s important for NZRT’s agent-driven workflow, where automated processes need to read and write data across systems.

Stepping back, the bigger picture here is that all of this — chat, video, calendar, contacts, task boards, and documentation — stays within NZRT’s secure, self-hosted infrastructure. You’re not depending on Slack staying affordable, Zoom’s terms of service, or Google’s data practices. The organisation controls the environment, the data, and the access.

So whether you’re coordinating a project on Deck, catching up on messages in Talk, or pulling up a shared process document in Collectives, it’s all running on the same platform, under the same credentials, with the same security boundary.

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

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.

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.