The technology takes an afternoon. The structure you set on day one decides whether the system is still clean in year three.
Most Nextcloud installs do not fail technically - they rot organisationally: the shared folder owned by someone who left, twelve duplicate shares of the same file, public links nobody remembers. One hour of structure on day one prevents all of it. This page is that hour.
The order matters. In Settings, Users, create your groups first - departments like Accounts, Sales, Office, plus a Managers group. Then create each user inside their group. Every sharing decision after this becomes "share with the Accounts group" instead of clicking twelve names - and when someone joins or leaves, you change one membership, not forty shares.
Give every user their own login from the start. Shared accounts destroy the whole point of the system: audit trails, per-user versions, and knowing who deleted the file.
Create one shared folder per department, owned by an admin or a dedicated system account, and share it with that department's group with edit rights. Now the folder survives staff changes - the classic disaster is the sales folder living in the personal account of the salesman who left in March.
Three rules cover most office reality. Share folders, not single files, for ongoing work - the file-by-file web becomes un-auditable within a month. View-only is a real choice - price lists and policy documents should be shared read-only to most staff, which also prevents the read-only surprise being mistaken for a system fault. Every public link gets an expiry date - links without expiry are forever, and forever is too long for a quotation sent to one client.
OnlyOffice respects all of this automatically: a view-only share opens in the editor as view-only, and an edit share opens ready to co-edit. The integration follows the sharing rules - it does not bypass them.
Once a month, open the Users page and ask three questions: anyone listed who has left (disable first, delete later, after their files are handed over)? Any group that no longer matches the real departments? Any giant public-link shares reported in the admin sharing overview? Ten minutes monthly keeps a system trustworthy for years; skipping it is how old staff keep access to live office files.
The video focuses on the servers - pair it with this page for the account structure to build right after install.
Watch Full VideoYes - always. Individual accounts are what make versions, activity history and permissions meaningful, and they let you disable one person's access the day they leave without touching anyone else's work. Shared logins defeat the entire system.
The structure, not a person - create them from an admin or dedicated system account and share them to the department group. If a folder lives in an employee's personal account, their departure becomes a data rescue operation.
Yes. The admin sharing settings can disable public uploads, force passwords and expiry on links, or restrict resharing. Set the defaults on day one while the system is small - tightening rules later, against habit, is much harder.