Repository navigation
[WIP][Overview] Teams roadmap #2664
Description
Vision
Teams becomes Nextcloud's unified team workspace: the place where a group of people gets all the resources they need to collaborate (files, chat, knowledge base, tasks, data) provisioned together, governed together, and surfaced together.
The problem
Today a team is just a list of people that other apps can share to. It can't own most types of resources, and it comes with none by default. The main issues are:
- Ownership. Almost every resource belongs to a single user; the team only gets access via share. Team admins have no power over resources owned by members, and storage counts against one person's quota instead of the team's (unless a team folder is configured). Team folders and Collectives already do this right: they belong to the team, have their own quota, and survive any member leaving.
- Membership. Sharing a resource with one person is much easier than adding them to the team, so who can access a resource slowly stops matching who is on the team.
- Provisioning. Creating a team gives you an empty group. We need to provide the space (a team-folder) and required resources to get started.
Target experience
- Creating a team also creates a space for the team: a team-folder where all it's resources will find a new home.
- Creating a team also creates some core default resources: a calendar, a talk conversation and a collective. Users could then add optional ones to the team page.
- The team page shows everything in one place: members, description, and all the team's resources.
- People and access are managed once, on the team, and through the use of roles. Every resource follows.
- Team members can be managed from any app that shows the team.
- Teams are never nested. Grouping teams should be possible, but only for navigation and search; it never grants access to content. This is inspired by SharePoint's new architecture.
- Existing teams can be upgraded to a full "team space".
Work items (Nextcloud 35 MVP)
Teams app (circles)
- Move the team page front-end from contacts to the circles feat(teams): in-app Teams page #2561
- Create team-folder when creating a team #2661
- Display the team’s Files app embedded within the Teams app. #2663
- Fix NoUserException groupfolders#2669
- Teams admin settings page Allow restricting team-creation to certain groups #2717
Team folders (groupfolders)
- Team-bound flag: folders created for a team are marked as such; ACLs are off by default and hidden from the team UI → Make team-folders actually assignable to a single team #2734, Allow a single team-folder to be assignet to a team as it's main storage #2643
- Teams section in admin settings: let everyone, or only a chosen group, create team folders, with a maximum size →
- Impossible to share group folders with circles you are not member of groupfolders#2665
- Team folders do not show up as part of team resources server#61385
Nextcloud 36 and future
- Team ownership of all Nextcloud resource types → Team-owned resources across Nextcloud #2644
- Store all team-related app-data in a team-folder #2637
- Visitor role: a team role that can only view; the first step towards a general role system
- Custom roles: define a role once (for example "Talk moderator"), set what it may do, and assign it to members; a member's rights are the sum of their roles → Custom roles #2646
- Shared team-management component: one frontend component plus API to view, add and remove members, usable from any app; permissions checked server-side → Manage team from Files UI #2432
- Sharing defaults on team resources: make adding people to the team easier than adding new shares, warn before sharing with an individual, and list such shares on the team
- Sharing lockdown per team: chosen at team creation; access comes only from membership, no re-sharing at all → Team setting: enable/disable sharing of team resources #2645
- Ability to organize teams in collections that provide nested navigation and search, but not access rights inheritance, modeled after sharepoint hubs
- widget page for Teams Team dashboard #2552
- Show activity of teams Show activity of team in Teams app #2692
- Track activities on Teams in the Audit log. Earlier PR for this: Sharing breaks after some time - oc_filecache at fault groupfolders#226
Reacted by Rikdekker
Activity
[-][Overview] Teams roadmap[/-][+][WIP][Overview] Teams roadmap[/+]Aveyron-RetD commentedon Jul 29, 2026
Could we add also as a milestone creating a team/editing a team => creates a contact group back in contacts and managing the team modify the contact group. As the teams Roadmap is getting away from contacts creating a contact group would make sense and would allow communicating to the teams with emails. Mail already support contact group
nextcloud/mail#1850
#1465
Maybe it should be an address book. You can share an address book, you cannot share group contact🫤 and you cannot share an address book with another team nextcloud/contacts#3993
jospoortvliet commentedon Jul 30, 2026
Interesting idea. Could just be virtual, don't you think? So that in mail you could simply email a team, just like you can assign a deck card to a team or share a calendar to a team? Then showing it as a contact group could be a virtual thing - read-only...
Aveyron-RetD commentedon Jul 30, 2026
Well you might want to decide who to share this "virtual mailing list" in your organisation or to other people.
I am ok with virtual as long as you can decide whom to share it with.
People are "used" to mailing list why not create one to be able to share to external people. This seems to be such a low hanging fruit but contact groups and address book both have downside.
jospoortvliet commentedon Jul 30, 2026
Below some background on how Nextcloud and Microsoft handle resources differently and why we would make these changes to Teams. Mostly written from the perspective of someone familiar with Nextcloud. Let me know if there are mistakes ;-)
Introduction
Most organizations working with the Microsoft platform make use of Sites in SharePoint as well as Teams in Microsoft Teams. Out of the box, these offer a fundamentally different view on resources compared to Nextcloud, by grouping most resources according to a Microsoft Group (visible as Team in Teams and Site in SharePoint). Nextcloud, by contrast, offers a more 'flat' model. Both models have strengths and weaknesses, but customers are fundamentally used to the Microsoft way and thus a way to provide this to Nextcloud is needed.
The models compared
Resources in Nextcloud are split between applications, with relations between them visible typically through sharing. For example, a document can be shared in a Talk room or attached to a Deck card. As user, you can organize the resources however you like.
In contrast, Microsoft tends to group different types of resources in relation to a Microsoft Group. A Group always automatically spawns a SharePoint site (files), a shared calendar and Mailbox (! hidden by default in Outlook, but there), a Planner plan, and a OneNote notebook. A Group (Team or Site) can have multiple channels (chat rooms). It is possible to create more notebooks and plans.
There are some issues with the Microsoft model - in particular, private channels (chats) spawn their own SharePoint site, can't have a plan, and are not associated with groups. Pulling in external people can be nightmarish and ownership is complicated so it gets messy quickly, also from a governance point of view. Companies tend to restrict a lot of features here, complicating collaboration. Moreover, there is no single "here's your day" overview from Microsoft, like we have at Nextcloud. Users tend to have Teams' Activity feed open, plus Outlook, plus Planner with My Tasks/My Day.
The Nextcloud model is, in many ways, much cleaner. A single overview across all tasks/groups/teams is default, even though Dashboard is much more limited than what SharePoint and Teams offer. But there are a few shortcomings compared to Microsoft.
Table
Aveyron-RetD commentedon Jul 31, 2026
Just for info https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/teamhub
and nextcloud/server#53125
I go quiet now. Keep up the good work and make Nextcloud Rock 👍
jospoortvliet commentedon Aug 26, 2026
yes, Teamhub's existence is another proof of this need, we've seen it. Though we mostly build teams now from the requirements from customers that are used to MS tools.
On the other hand, we've been trying to find ways to achieve this more connected view of resources mentioned in nextcloud/server#53125 for MANY years. We introduced Nextcloud Projects some 5 years ago - a way to link resources. Then, because that had to be done manually, we replaced it with Related Resources. In the meantime, Circles was developed to allow non-admins to create custom groups. These were combined, last year, in Teams - which are associated with resources, but it's still just shared. Ownership of resources is the key point, and thats' what we are tackling here. With that will come some views of the resources in one place, but we haven't fully decided how to do that. The approach of basically rebuilding other Nextcloud apps in the Teams app is not very sustainable, embedding whole apps is slow and Dashboard widgets are not interactive/powerful enough. How else to do it is something we will find out in the coming releases ;-)
Aveyron-RetD commentedon Aug 27, 2026
It'd help if there was some kind of automatic organisation down the parent → child chain, or through linked content, to enable quick access to our stuff.
I agree with @drbanner here — teams are just the tip of the iceberg. Teams of people work on projects and organise themselves however they like. That's where Nextcloud shines, we're not stuck to one way of organising. But data ends up scattered, and people need to find stuff based on the project it belongs to, not just who owns it.
Concretely: a team-folder (or any parent) tagged/associated with a project auto-propagates that down to subfolders, files, and anything linked or embedded into it, instead of everything starting untagged and scattered. Permissions could follow the same principle later — inherited by default from the parent unless overridden.
Side thought, not sure if it fits here or deserves its own issue: could there also be a temporal layer on top of the tag-based one? Like, if I edited a file and around the same time opened an email and another doc, those could get loosely linked as "probably the same task" — even without anyone tagging anything. Could help surface stuff that's scattered across apps but never got organised on purpose.
Might be a stretch for this issue though
marcoambrosini commentedon Sep 30, 2026
Hi @Aveyron-RetD, we're discussing projects here: https://github.com/orgs/nextcloud/projects/150/views/12?pane=issue&itemId=213502740&issue=nextcloud|circles|2636
Feel free to drop your ideas :)
I'm closing this overview as everyone is on the same page on the general vision. Everything in here is reflected in other overview issues like the one I linked above.