How Stellfeld & Ernst GmbH shapes digital collaboration using ONLYOFFICE Docs and Nextcloud

Stellfeld & Ernst GmbH is using ONLYOFFICE Docs in combination with Nextcloud and Zimbra to share and edit documents within the team. Thomas Lewandowski, Deputy IT Manager, talks about their experience.

About Stellfeld & Ernst GmbH

Stellfeld & Ernst GmbH is a versatile trading company with six locations in Dortmund, Germany. The traditional Dortmund-based company was founded by Peter Ernst in 1963. What would be called a startup these days has developed in almost 60 years of company history — from five employees and one gas station in the very beginning, into the leading supplier of camping, leisure, barbecue and garden furniture articles with over 240 team members and six retail branches in Dortmund.

Today, the family-run company is divided into nine specialized retail ranges, the so-called theme worlds. The product range includes more than 85,000 items, including barbecue equipment, garden furniture, camping, caravans, trailers, trailer hitches, workshop, gases and party supplies.

The passion for outdoor living and entrepreneurship have been driven forward since 2017 in the second generation with Andreas Ernst as a managing director. S&E still has its regional roots, and at the same time the company is growing steadily and will soon open its seventh location in Dortmund.

Why ONLYOFFICE

As Mr. Lewandowski recalls, they were looking for a resilient and scalable system that would significantly reduce maintenance and installation costs. Installing office applications on local PCs was not an option. In addition, not least because of the Corona pandemic challenges, they wanted to significantly improve digital collaboration.

Thanks to the system integrator LWsystems, which is our partner in Germany, Stellfeld & Ernst found out about ONLYOFFICE. And now LWsystems is the official supplier of ONLYOFFICE Docs for S&E.

The integration is successfully functioning within Nextcloud in Zimbra.

A few points, such as the size of the editing window, could still be improved. All in all, the solution is good to work with.

Most needed features

Mr. Lewandowski says that thanks to ONLYOFFICE they have managed to greatly reduce the installation effort for new systems. Besides, all team members now work with the same file formats and can easily exchange and further edit files with each other.

The following features are the most useful ones for the staff:

• Integration with Zimbra / Nextcloud to preview documents;
• Integration with Zimbra / Nextcloud for collaborative document editing;
• Document creation.

Thomas Lewandowski, Deputy IT Manager:

By using ONLYOFFICE, we were able to simplify internal document creation and drastically reduce the maintenance effort for software applications.