Swedish Government: Nextcloud premier digital collaboration platform

In a government rapport about options for digital collaboration platform technologies for the public sector, the Swedish government put Nextcloud front and center as the key solution in this space. Over the coming months, several large roll-outs are expected to begin. The report was put together by 8 Swedish government agencies, including the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish Companies Registration Office and the Försäkringskassan.

You can download the full report (in Swedish) here and in English here.

Defining the concept of digital collaboration platform

The report gives an exhaustive definition of digital collaboration, noting the important components needed for teams to work together. Visualized below, they consists of:

• Document management with collaborative editing
• Persistent chat rooms
• Video calls
• Whiteboarding
• Planning and coordiation with Kanban

The document describes that, when working together, there are several modes in which the work might be organized, something that depends on the task, team and situation. It can be the chat room that is central to the work, or the project and task management, or the file collaboration solution. This makes it clear that it is important that each of these three is capable of holding its own and playing the central role that is asked of it.

Market analysis

The report continues to describe the results of the market analysis by the 8 government agencies. They have found two complete platforms that have the required maturity and compliance to be suitable for large-scale, government use:

• Nextcloud (open source, self hosted or cloud-hosted by Swedish providers)
• Compliant Office (proprietary, public cloud in Sweden hosted, IceWarp based)

The report also notes it is possible to build a mis-mash of various separate solutions that together provide the same functionality. Of course, such solutions will have overlap and gaps and not offer the integrated and efficient user collaboration experience of a complete, all-in-one solution.

This makes Nextcloud in many cases the best, most suitable, open source and on-premises platform for collaboration in Government.

Nextcloud is already in use at the Swedish Transport Agency and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, while Försäkringskassan offers authorities Nextcloud as a service. Further deployments are expected.