How Equal Rights Beyond Borders enforces human rights with ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud

The nonprofit organization Equal Rights Beyond Borders integrated ONLYOFFICE Docs with Nextcloud to ensure effective document collaboration under time pressure. Robert Nestler, Managing Director, talks about their experience.

About Equal Rights Beyond Borders

Equal Rights Beyond Borders is a Greek-German human rights organization that enforces the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in Greece, Germany and the entire EU. Since 2017, the organization is recognized as non-profit.

An international and multilingual team includes human rights lawyers, jurists and interpreters. They work in the main office departments in Athens and Berlin and in local offices on the islands of Chios and Kos.

Equal Rights Beyond Borders provides all the services free of charge since they believe that all people should know their rights and have access to highly qualified legal assistance.

The organization members stand by the side of refugees, fight against undignified living conditions in refugee camps in Greece, unlawful imprisonment and illegal deportations. They advocate family reunions from all over the world to Germany and other EU countries.

The organization focuses on individual case work and strategic litigation before Greek, German and European courts.

A way to ONLYOFFICE

As Robert Nestler tells us, they have been looking for a self-hosted office suite alternative that works easily online in their IT ecosystem. The security aspect is also important to the organization. During their targeted research, they came across ONLYOFFICE.

So, they established Nextcloud as a central team collaboration component and can also use ONLYOFFICE there smoothly and intuitively.

Overall, the integration of ONLYOFFICE into Nextcloud is successful at Equal Rights Beyond Borders. Giving the feedback, Robert Nestler mentions their wishes for a smaller Nextcloud header in ONLYOFFICE Docs as well as the live mode in the desktop app.

Effective collaboration and easy switchover

All employees can now collaborate on Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents much more seamlessly and intuitively. At the same time, files can be saved as .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx and edited on the computer in MS Word – for those who find it easier.

In addition, the whole design and structure also reminds of Word to the employees. This helps extremely with the switchover and makes it very easy to get used to.

Most needed features

According to Robert Nestler, the following advantages of ONLYOFFICE are the most useful to them:

• First of all, text editing (Word alternative);
• Excel alternative;
• PowerPoint alternative;
• An ability to store documents templates centrally in Nextcloud and use them with ONLYOFFICE.

Sometimes they also use ONLYOFFICE forms, however, not so often.

Robert Nestler, Managing Director:

ONLYOFFICE has greatly simplified our work – it is very important for us that the collaboration works well and live and that we can rely on it. We are often under time pressure and cannot afford to let technology prevent us from meeting deadlines. Moreover, our colleagues are not always IT experts. The ease of use and similarity to familiar Office programs helps a lot – with the added security and certainty that we decide who can see our data and who can’t.