How ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud help Foodsharing Austria carry out an important mission

Today we are introducing Foodsharing Austria which uses ONLYOFFICE Docs in combination with Nextcloud to support effective online collaboration between the organization members. Valentin Gritsch, a technician at Foodsharing Austria and a board member of Foodsharing Styria, talks about his team’s experience.

About Foodsharing Austria

Unimaginable amounts of food are destroyed every year all over the world (according to WWF, around 1,300,000,000 tons). It means that with a world population of 7 billion people, half a kilo of food per person ends up in the garbage every day!

The idea of food sharing arose around 9 years ago in Berlin and soon spread to many cities in Germany. At the end of 2013, the idea also reached Austria. With currently 5,000 active members, leftover food is collected from around 585 companies on a daily basis.

All the groceries are made available to people in various ways. Those in need can get the rescued food on special spots from boxes and refrigerators. Such boxes are also available to everyone who is sorry for over-bought and leftover food and who doesn’t just want to throw it away.

Food removal from such boxes is based on personal responsibility. It’s completely free and unconditional. Food sharing is open to everyone who finds such ideas worth supporting.

Food sharing spot, a photo by Valentin Gritsch

The Foodsharing Austria association supports the above-mentioned initiative in multiple aspects such as IT-infrastructure maintenance, search for sponsors, educational work, account management, public relations, advertising materials, etc.

Why ONLYOFFICE

Along with the engagement at the Foodsharing Austria association, Valentin Gritsch is also an IT system administrator at the HTU Graz (student body at the Graz University of Technology) where ONLYOFFICE is used as well.

Due to the GDPR, Foodsharing Austria has to store all personal data on its own servers. At the same time, the organization members are distributed all over Austria working on a voluntary basis. Not all of them are technically experienced users.

So, they needed a document editing tool that is as simple and user-friendly as possible and allows storing all data ‘in-house’. That’s why the decision was made for ONLYOFFICE.

Most needed features

With ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud, collaboration between the Foodsharing Austria staff is centralized on one platform. They find the following ONLYOFFICE features most useful:

• Co-authoring docs in real-time.
• Creating easily editable contact lists in .xlsx format.
• Preparing and making presentations.

Valentin Gritsch would definitely recommend ONLYOFFICE to other users and organizations. For Foodsharing Austria it was very easy to implement ONLYOFFICE. They say that user instructions are very detailed and the support team answers within a very short time.

Valentin Gritsch:

I‘m pleasantly surprised how easy it is to install and integrate ONLYOFFICE in Nextcloud. The use is extremely seamless and you don’t need any technical know-how.