Learning Bytes and Behaviours at the Digital Workplace Day

Our partner Redpill Linpro is organising their Digital Workplace Day event on September 8 in Stockholm. We sat down with Johan Bernhardsson, CEO of the Digital Workplace division at Redpill Linpro to discuss the digital workplace, the role of open source and Nextcloud in particular and their upcoming event Digital Workplace Day in Stockholm next month.

What is a digital workplace and what are you offering?

We want to empower employees and organisations by offering a flexible, reliable and trustworthy digital workplace solution. This workplace solution builds upon an integrated set of tools to help you collaborate with colleagues as if you were in the same room.

This involves more than just applying technology because you need to cater to the behaviour of your employees. Some dynamics of a physical working environment like water cooler conversations or social support systems are essential to any digital workplace deployment.

Your workplace solution uses quite some open source components. Can you explain the rationale behind that choice?

We want to offer our clients full control and maximum choice while at the same time provide them the required trust they need for the software they use. We use open source components for our digital workplace solution to check and validate how the software works. The option to be able to control the software leverages trust. Open source software usually drives maximum compatibility with other systems and assures excellent portability of your data.

That’s why we choose Nextcloud at the heart of our digital workplace offering. You can extend Nextcloud with other software components. Nextcloud is reliable and trustworthy because it lets you control the complete collaboration stack. And Nextcloud ensures you full portability of your data and even provides you means to move your data across systems.

How does data portability relate to data sovereignty and cloud sovereignty? And what do these terms mean in the context of a digital workplace?

Data portability is about making sure that all the collected data in your collaboration stack can be easily moved to another system. Some collaboration solutions claim to offer that but actually only provide a dump of your data. That’s pretty useless and I consider such practices a blatant abuse of the term data portability.

A lack of data portability can cause you serious problems when you want to move data from one (cloud) platform to another. Not taking data portability as a requirement can harm your collaboration stack and will limit your choices for the future.

Being able to move data is only one part of the equation, because you want to know how your data is used on the cloud platforms where you stored your data. A big driver is a directive like the GDPR where the data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located. But honestly you want to look for a situation where you have your data in the cloud under your own control whatever data protection directive is invigorating.

When moving or processing data you want to look for a situation where you have your data in the cloud under your own control. The ability to choose is the big differentiator over what the big names are offering. A modern digital workplace solution lets you place it (in the cloud) under your control to ensure the protection and portability of your data.

You are organising an event about the digital workplace?

After some time we are organising again our Digital Workplace Day event. It takes place on September 8th in Stockholm, Sweden. Because it is a hybrid event you can either physically attend or watch the event live stream. All of the talks and sessions will be in English and you have the option to remotely participate in discussions and to submit your questions.

The event shares the experiences around the digital workplace and demonstrates how other organisations are using the software. The event aims to offer corporate and government organisations a learning experience about the digital workplace. We welcome everyone to join us at this event and contribute to the learning experience.

At Digital Workplace Day our Nextcloud experts on the ground in Stockholm will present the latest version of Nextcloud. We will also host a dedicated Nextcloud track where we present and discuss specific examples of Nextcloud use within the public sector.