Rescue, extinguish, salvage, protect: ONLYOFFICE in use by the Abensberg Fire Department

The Abensberg Fire Department uses ONLYOFFICE Docs in combination with Nextcloud to easily share and edit centrally stored office documents. Thorsten Schwartz, ICT Cloud Fire Department Abensberg, talks about their experience.

… we are here.

The Abensberg Fire Department is a volunteer fire department in Abensberg, a town with around 15,000 inhabitants in the heart of Bavaria in Germany. Its core tasks include ensuring defensive fire protection and providing technical assistance to citizens at any time of day or night.

Thorsten Schwartz, ICT Cloud Fire Department Abensberg:

Like most fire departments in Germany, we are organized exclusively by volunteer firefighters. In an emergency, we are alerted via pager and smartphone, leave our workplace or home, drive to the fire station and from there continue to the scene with the fire engines. Our voluntary nature and the associated high level of motivation offer a broad spectrum of different people from many professional groups with a wide range of expert knowledge and are our basis for effective, comradely and trusting cooperation. We, the firefighters, together with efficient equipment and solid training, are an essential part of success in the German fire department system.

“… we are here.” According to the guiding principle of the Abensberg Fire Department, we are available to the citizens of Abensberg in all emergencies and always have our finger on the pulse with ideas, improvements and innovation together in a strong team – 365 days a year, around the clock!

A way to ONLYOFFICE

Thorsten Schwartz explains that one of the working areas within their structure is Information and Communication (ICT). In order to give firefighters access to information for training and further education within a non-public system, the need for an independent cloud was recognized relatively quickly at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic and successfully implemented with Nextcloud.

All operationally relevant documents, such as fire department and building plans, instructions, documentation, etc. are now available to emergency services on the cloud and can therefore be accessed on the way to the scene.

When looking for an office solution as an integral part of their cloud, ONLYOFFICE quickly emerged as a winner in combination with Nextcloud. Good MS Office compatibility and the fact that ONLYOFFICE runs on the end devices by design and therefore uses few resources on the root server are a clear added value, especially with regard to collaboration.

ONLYOFFICE is a highly developed alternative to MS Office. All features that are expected in a standard environment are made possible by ONLYOFFICE. The implementation with ONLYOFFICE under Nextcloud makes sense as soon as you have decided on a cost-optimized use of your own root server and always want to organize the origin and whereabouts of your data yourself.

Perfectly functioning combo

As Thorsten Schwartz reports, they see the combo of ONLYOFFICE and Nextcloud as an essential component of their IT environment. The Abensberg Fire Department creates reports, tables, photos and much more, shares and synchronizes them with situation maps and drone videos from the scene to higher-level command centers, such as the district office. Through a consistent and open feedback culture, they create a high-performance system which is adapted to the needs and tasks of the fire department.

The integration of ONLYOFFICE in Nextcloud is currently mapped as a Docker container on the root server. In the future, the entire Nextcloud with all necessary services will be migrated to a Docker cluster under Docker Compose. Of course, the data backup concept and the migration itself are also exciting tasks for the near future.

The friendly support team at ONLYOFFICE is always a great source of help with any questions, and can also reliably solve challenges within the Nextcloud community.

Most needed features

For the Abensberg Fire Department, reading documents (mainly MS Office documents and PDFs) is one of the most important features of ONLYOFFICE.

The exchange and synchronization of documents is usually sufficient for training and further education.

The situation is different in the field. Large-scale events in particular require real-time editing of lists and documents. Here, for example, the ICT systems were used well and efficiently during the flood disaster in Bavaria in June 2024. The Abensberg Fire Department, together with many emergency services from other cities and organizations, was involved in the distribution and deployment of tens of thousands of sandbags.

For us, the platform independence with constant synchronization from the smartphone to the desktop in our operations center is a major plus for the ONLYOFFICE-Nextcloud combo.