Collaborate using servus cloud
This guide will show you how to collaborate with your work colleagues and friends using the cloud, and which apps you can use for that.
With the access to a mailbox you can also use our cloud suite.
How to get it
Over at https://cloud.servus.at every member receives an account with 10GB storage in our instance of Nextcloud suite. Your credentials for cloud are identical to your email credentials, so you can start using it now with your existing username (m_name) and password.
To become a member, currently, you have to apply for a membership via our membership form that is available through our organization’s website.
General Info
After you have logged in to your account, you are ready to use the Nextcloud suite. The following are tools (also called apps within the Nextcloud ecosystem) that are enabled within the cloud to help you work collaboratively and store data without having to worry about your privacy being violated:
Files
File storage is the main function for the desktop sync client. You should consider using your 10GB space optimally, taking into consideration what you might always need to access and synchronize among multiple devices; as well as what you will be collaboratively working on and what needs sharing with others.
Calendar
You can create your own calendars from scratch or subscribe to other peoples calendars as well as import them to your cloud account. Sharing your calendars via their CalDAV addresses as well as publishing them to make them viewable for external users is possible.
Follow this external guide.
Deck
Kanban style organization tool that is aimed to help individual and group project management for better, organized workflows.
Talk
Chat & video conferencing tool that helps you easily and quickly communicate with others that also work with the same tools and documents as you. This tool is enabled to ensure fast communication between team members, but it is crucial to note that it is not a replacement for your daily teleconferencing needs.
Circles
Circles allow users to create their own groups with other users on the same cloud instance in order to organize different working groups to share and communicate with.
Time Tracker
A simple time tracker to help you track time. You can categorize the time you spent by project & client, use tags and add descriptions for each entry. It allows you to generate and export reports for your specified date range and offers an overview of how you split your time between the different projects and clients.
Contacts
You can easily manage your contacts list on the cloud by importing and exporting your already existing contacts from your phone or email client.
Follow this external guide.
A web-based mail client for you to use within cloud, in case you prefer it to a full-fledged email client like Thunderbird or the offered interface from your email provider.
Tasks
Manage task-lists that are linked to your cloud calendars. Thus tasks can be synchronized using CalDAV, to sync it to your local client – Thunderbird, Evolution, KDE Kontact, iCal, … Tasks can be shared between users and you can download your tasks as ICS files using the download button for each calendar.
You can set the tasks priority and status, create subtasks, simply drag and drop tasks to other calendars or make them subtasks. Smart collections show you your important, current and upcoming tasks so you can easily keep track of what needs to be done.
Forms
Create surveys and questionnaires with a simple user interface. No mass of options, only the essentials. Results are visualized directly and can also be exported as CSV. Unlike in Google Forms, Typeform, Doodle and others, the survey info and responses are kept private on your instance.
Polls
Simple polls, e.g. for scheduling meetings (as an alternative to Doodle or dudle) that you can share privately, internally or publicly.
You can create and edit polls (datetimes and texts) , set a closing date, share polls with users, groups, contacts and circles and even ivite external users with a unique link or via email address.
Additionally you can decide if you want to show or hide results permanently or until the poll is closed and create anonymized polls (participants names get pseudonymized for other users) and much more.
Bookmarks
Collect, organize and share web page bookmarks. You can browse and filter your bookmarks via tags, folders and by using the built-in search feature and you can share folders with other users and groups as well as create public links for them. Also, in order to access your bookmarks anywhere, it also allows you to synchronize with third-party clients via a built-in REST API – be it in your browsers or on your phone. Check out the third-party clients listed here.
Best Practice
Upload photos from your smartphone directly to the cloud
On an Android phone you can install the Nextcloud app via F-Droid (an alternative to Google Playstore). There you can enable “Automatic Upload” and the pictures you take with your phone will be uploaded to the cloud immediately. You can use this feature to prevent the loss of your photos in case you lose your smartphone or it gets stolen. To protect your privacy, you can delete the pictures from your phone right after.
How to permanently assign files to another person because an account is to be deleted
Sometimes it happens that in an association one person has managed files in the cloud that should be transferred to a new person. With these steps you can move files to another account yourself:
At https://cloud.servus.at/settings/user/sharing you can select a file or directory and assign it to another person.
However, this procedure only works with users in the same cloud instance and not between two different cloud instances.
Share files between multiple clouds
For example, if you have multiple Nextcloud or ownCloud accounts with different providers, you can easily share files between the clouds, this is called “Federated Share”. You only need the Federated Cloud ID of the cloud you want to share with. The cloud has the ID username@cloud.servus.at. You have to replace username with the name of the person you want to share with (e.g. sabina).
To share something, enter the Federated Cloud ID in the “share” dialog. The recipient will get a pop up note and can accept the share.
You can find your own Federated Cloud ID to share at https://cloud.servus.at/settings/user/sharing
Share documents with multiple people at the same time
If you want to share documents with the same people more often, you can group them together. You do this with the Circles app, which you can find in the menu bar at the top as a Circle icon (https://cloud.servus.at/apps/circles/). There you can create your Circle in a first step and then add other people to your Circle via the icon in the upper right corner. If you then want to share folders or documents, you only have to enter the name of the Circle.
Share several documents at once
If you want to share several documents, you can simply put them in a common folder and share the folder with the relevant people. The editing rights you use for the folder will be transferred to all documents in it.
If all e-mails have been deleted by mistake, a simple e-mail to office@servus.at is sufficient and we will restore your mail account.
By default every user is given 10 GB space. Of course if you really are in need of it on a regular basis, we will gladly raise the limit!
But please note that normally we kindly ask our members to reconsider how critical all the data they would like to keep on cloud is, before asking for an expansion. Also if it’s really necessary for their daily use for collaboration and important data.
As for the time being cloud.servus.at is not intended to be a data-storage solution for large archives, but rather for important documents and collaboration focused content for day-to-day workloads.
Even though we would love to offer unlimited storage to all our members, because of the limitations we have within the data center, it is not a sustainable or a realistic scenario for what we can currently offer.
You can drop an e-mail to office@servus.at and request an increase if necessary.
Sure, you can also communicate encrypted in the cloud webmail. For this you need the browser extension Mailvelope. Mailvelope is available for Firefox, Chrome (also for Vivaldi) and Edge. Besides the key management you have to make sure to add to the preconfigured e-mail providers. To send an encrypted reply, you don’t click on the blue “Reply” button at the very bottom as usual, but there is a transparent button in the middle of the message that triggers a pop-up window to send an encrypted or signed message.
No, we did not enable server-side encryption. And this is for three main reasons:
- It was still in an experimental phase until very recently.
- It requires more server-side processing power.
- It is possible for you to make use of end-to-end encryption using the new versions of the clients.
This way we can make sure that for the average user there is no extra layer of complexity. And in case of a recovery from a disaster scenario, there aren’t additional potential issues.
For users who require encryption because of sensitive information: we are currently testing out the new production ready end-to-end encryption feature. Once it is enabled we will update the documentation on how to set it up.
In the meantime you can use a solution like VeraCrypt in order to encrypt folders and only decrypt them locally on your device while only synchronizing encrypted data.
Yes, you can connect to the cloud service via WebDav in your file browser.
Server: cloud.servus.at
Type: SecureWebDAV(HTTPS)
Folder or path: /remote.php/webdav/
User details:
Username: m_name
Password: The password you use to retrieve your mail.Or on the other hand you can install desktop clients that automatically synchronize a folder in your file system with Nextcloud. See https://nextcloud.com/install/#install-clients.
Yes. You must provide a folder with the appropriate sharing rights and send the link to the specific person or group. Read more here.
Probably your file is too big. If you are uploading via the web interface files must not be larger than 512 MB. Otherwise you can use the desktop client, which does not have any upload limits. To avoid errors while uploading, we also recommend using the desktop client when dealing with many or large files.
Multiple files are downloaded from the cloud in archive form as .zip (top right download button). Under Mac OSX and Windows (older than Windows 7) it can happen that these .zip files are not recognized correctly and cannot be unpacked. Only additional programs like 7-Zip can help. For OSX there is also keka which uses 7-Zip as a basis.
Docs
Here you will find some useful tips and links that will help you with extending your use of servus cloud. Read more about how to use the desktop client, mobile apps, etc.
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