Hey everyone,
I’m part of an internal working group at a healthcare provider with around 9,000 employees (roughly 500 of them in non-medical administration), and we’re currently having some pretty serious discussions about whether we could replace Microsoft 365 entirely with Nextcloud.
More specifically, we’re looking at:
Nextcloud Talk instead of Teams
Collabora or OnlyOffice instead of Word/Excel/PowerPoint
possibly Nextcloud Mail for internal communication instead of Outlook/Exchange
The main driver is honestly cost. The M365 licenses alone for our administrative staff add up to a significant amount every year. On top of that, GDPR and general data protection concerns are a major factor — especially in healthcare, where US-based cloud services tend to be viewed much more critically.
I’d really be interested to hear if anyone here has gone through a similar transition and could share some real-world experience.
Especially:
Has anyone actually replaced M365 completely with Nextcloud? How did it go?
Is Nextcloud Talk realistically usable as a day-to-day Teams replacement, or do you run into limitations quickly?
How well do Collabora or OnlyOffice work as substitutes for Word/Excel in practice? Where are the real pain points?
How did you handle user adoption? Telling people “we’re taking away Teams and Outlook” usually doesn’t go over particularly well 😅
Are there any healthcare-specific pitfalls we should be aware of? For example integrations with clinical systems, scheduling/on-call tools, and similar things?
We’re still very much in the early discussion phase, so honest opinions — including “don’t do it” experiences — are absolutely welcome.
Thanks in advance!

I really want to give it another go to replace Microsoft 365 and be data sovereign. I'm technical enough to self-host and support via the team. What I'm not good at is finding best practice guides. For example;

- user lifecycle management? Where is that handled such that our users only have one set of credentials? Nextcloud?, Mailserver?, Keycloak or alternatives?
- email server? I'm familiar with Mailcow and how to host without spam, but how does that integrate, and again during user provisioning? And what about shared mailboxes, groups, delegations, aliases etc...I mean it says they have Nexcloud Groupware, but what is the server behind it then? What is best practice?
- Likewise with NextCloud Talk and NextCloud Office

Perhaps I am overthinking this, but to me it seems that the mail server is super important to glue things together and help with communication, but that is the part that isn't included. And pointers towards best practice?

I know the discussion of ownCloud vs NextCloud is as old as time but most of those discussions focus on the photo and file syncing features. I wanna know if ownCloud or NextCloud would be better for office and collaborative work. Stuff like hosting and running Collabora, CalDAV, CardDAV, file sharing.

Hello guys, do you know about some alternative to OneDrive and NextCloud? I'm using NextCloud for photos sync between my phone and PC and I love it, but for the documents I'm not so happy with it.

For example when I open a Excel document in my phone that is on OneDrive and I make some changes then the changes are just there.

But when I do it from NextCloud file the file is downloaded to my phone and I have to upload it again after makes some changes.

Is there any alternative to work better than this?