Getting Started With Nextcloud

First things first

You should have received an admin username and password to manage your Nextcloud instance. You will use the admin login to change the configuration of your Nextcloud, install apps, and manage users.

The first thing you should do is create a non-admin user for yourself. To do this, log in with the admin credentials, and you should see a circle with an A in it in the upper right of the screen. That is a pull-down menu with useful things on it, including "Users".

Select Users then the New user button in the upper left. Enter a username, display name, password, and their email address. Then click the Add button at the bottom. Now that user can log in.

Adding Apps

The initial setup includes the file sharing and photos app. If you want to add others, like the calendar, here is how.

• Log in as the admin.
• Under the A menu, select Apps
• You'll see a list of apps that are already installed (if they have a "Disable" button on the right, it means they are currently enabled).
• Click Featured Apps on the left and it will show you the list of commonly used apps. The top of the list will be the ones you already have installed. Scroll down to the others.
• Many people want to do shared Calendar and Contacts. Scroll down to Calendar, click the "Download and Enable" button. Do the same for "Contacts".
• Now those apps will have little icons accross the top of the main Nextcloud screen. Don't forget to log out of admin and log in with your personal account before you start adding calendar items.
• In the app list, when you click an app name it will give you a short description of the app and what it does.
• Some other popular apps include:
  • Deck (a Trello-like organization tool)
  • Forms (to make questionairres and survey forms)
  • File Access Control - more fine-grained controls you have multiple groups of users that need to selectively share some files with other groups but not all groups, etc. Or even more elaborate, like "only allow HR files to be accessed from computers logged in to the local network, not over the Internet"
  • Maps - use maps while keeping your data private
  • Tasks - shared task lists, which can also integrate with your calendar within Nextcloud and on your devices/Thunderbird/etc.
  • Talk - chat, screen-sharing, video conferencing. Kind of like slack or whatsapp or discord, but running on your own server with complete privacy.

Desktop Sync

You can sync your Nextcloud files to a folder on your desktop. Head over to https://nextcloud.com/install/ and click the "Download for Desktop" link and select the version for your computer type (i.e. Windows or MacOS).

When you run the installer it will prompt you to log in to Nextcloud through your browser. You'll be asked to grant permission for that app to access your Nextcloud files. After that you may be prompted to select what files to sync or not.

On Windows, there is an option for Virtual File updates. This will show you all the files but not transfer them to your computer until you access them. The alternative is a full sync, in which you will have full copies of all the files at all times. Which of these is best for you depends on whether having all the files as quickly as possible is important, at the expense of more bandwidth transferring files you may never open. If you need to access the files while offline (on a plane or desert island) you want to do full sync.

After setup, there will be a Nextcloud folder in the user directory on your computer which has the files mirrored from your Nextcloud server.

Getting Help

• The full Nextcloud documentation is here: https://docs.nextcloud.com/
• Feel free to contact help@swcp.com if you run into any problems or have questions about Nextcloud or how to accomplish certain things.