600 Employees at Berlin NGO AWO Collaborate through Nextcloud

Post date

February 2, 2023

Categories

Author

Mikaela Schneider

At AWO Berlin-Mitte, 600 team members work with Nextcloud Hub, using Files, Talk, Deck, Tasks and more to communicate, share, plan and collaborate around often very critical, personal data. Read on to learn why AWO choose Nextcloud!

AWO Berlin-Mitte is a major provider of social work and welfare programs in Berlin. They are a volunteer and membership organization with 1,300 members and provide services ranging from managing day care centers for children, aid for people with disabilities and the homeless, services for refugees seeking asylum, housing and counseling and more.

As a result of the pandemic, a large part of the organization’s consulting and administrative work shifted to remote working. To enable their employees and volunteers to have the flexibility to work from home, they needed a solution. Furthermore, AWO Berlin-Mitte placed a high importance on having the new solution be 100% GDPR compliant, unlike other popular platforms like Microsoft and Google. That’s why the esteemed social work association looked to Nextcloud.

“Nextcloud made it possible for us to work under Covid-19 conditions.”
– Peter Reif, IT and Data Management at AWO Berlin-Mitte

Nextcloud provides AWO Berlin-Mitte a secure, online collaboration platform that fits their needs. For communicating and collaborating with colleagues on a daily basis, employees use Nextcloud Talk, Deck, Tasks and Polls. Access Control Lists are a key feature for security and meeting GDPR requirements makes Nextcloud the ideal solution.

GDPR compliant solution

Every day, employees at Berlin-Mitte are working with individual’s personal data case by case. The social workers have a responsibility to protect this confidential data from leaking. With Nextcloud, employees can process, store and delete any personal data without having to worry about privacy, as the data stays on servers 100% controlled by AWO.

Meeting the data protection requirements of Europe and Germany was a crucial factor in AWO Berlin-Mitte’s decision making process. Nextcloud provides AWO Berlin-Mitte a secure, online collaboration platform that fits their needs.

Infinite collaboration

Currently, Nextcloud is actively being used by approximately 600 of AWO Berlin’s employees.

“Users welcomed and are enjoying the collaborative nature in Nextcloud. With Talk, they can communicate one on one or in teams as well as share documents, spreadsheets and presentations. With Deck, they can organize and prioritize tasks individually or in a collaboration in teams.”
– AWO Berlin-mitte

With a wide range of integrations and apps, including Mindmap, Tasks, and Polls, Nextcloud has become an indispensable tool for streamlining collaboration efforts.

In the future, AWO Berlin plans to add its volunteers to Nextcloud too – so all members of the organization will be able to collaborate together!

Key feature for AWO: ACLs

For Berlin-Mitte, having configurable group folders that allow for special access and authorization permissions was a key to their success. This was especially important while dealing with confidential data in complex services.

Now administrators have control over what their team can do within a folder, subfolder or document. This system is called an ACL or Access Control List and lets the administrator choose who can read, write, create, delete, share and download a folder or document. Group folders give the authority to administrators while still creating a collaborative environment for employees.

Learn more about AWO Berlin-Mitte and its mission on their website.

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