Thoughts on NextCloud + OpenProject Integration
Recent news of integration between NextCloud and OpenProject was welcomed by the broader community and felt like a natural progression that bordered on overdue.
Having designed, deployed and maintained both these projects on enterprise self-hosted systems for a while now, it felt like the integrations between these two projects was finally sounding the advent of corporate groupware that would provide the flexibility, and interoperability towards more productivity for end users on one end, as well as better control and management over data processes from a systems perspective.
Typical groupware solutions revolve around three main axes: Collaboration, Communication, Infrastructure, with each of these axes comprising a number of interrelated components that form the groupware stack.
Project management solutions share a lot of similar components with Groupware, chiefly Communication and Infrastructure with an approach to Collaboration revolving mainly around the distribution of tasks.
By integrating the key components of Project Management with Groupware, we can achieve a higher level of sharing on the Collaboration axis and leverage in parallel the Communication components already in place to keep teams appraised either asynchronously or in real-time depending on the communication components available.
This in turn would lead to better insight into the project(s) progress as well as keep a clearer trail of assignments, responsibilities and accountability throughout the project lifecycle.
Project templates and reusability also benefit from decoupling the Project Management Collaboration axis from the ones below by providing a higher level of abstraction while leveraging the pre-existing components in the Communication and Infrastructure axes.
Interfacing the Project Management components with their Groupware equivalents also provides a more streamlined and simplified view of projects for managers and users alike who may not want or require the more detailed views that usually accompany project management interfaces.
This can also be used to provide a dashboard like view of all projects and their respective timelines while still allowing stakeholders to participate in the conversation and outcome by providing them with this more simplified interface, all from within the groupware layers.
In this specific case NextCloud’s Tasks and Deck apps can certainly be used as a simplified presentational tools for OpenProject’s project(s) while still being a conduit to the Communication and Infrastructure layers already available via the Deck interface.
Same applies to the Calendar component in Groupware where tasks assigned in projects also appear in the calendar allowing for better time planning and management with events that go beyond the scope of the projects.
Though early days, the integration of these two projects presents a boon for their corresponding user bases as more convergence and cross functionalities between both projects start to see the light.
Exciting times indeed looking forward to further integration towards a more streamlined and productive usage of both these platforms while simplifying the user experience and the systems maintenance.
