maximumpc.com MAY 2020 MAXIMUM PC 15
Alex Campbell
OPEN SOURCE
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Working from Home? Try
These Open-Source Tools
WITH THE SPREADING pandemic of coronavirus, or COVID-19, many
companies are asking employees to work from home. For bigger
businesses, enterprise solution offerings from Google or Microsoft might
be the default, but some companies may not want to have to rely on Big
Tech to get work done. Luckily, there are open-source alternatives.
One of my favor ite things about
Nextcloud is the ability to use
different storage back ends.A lot of workers will be working from home in
the coming weeks. As a result, they will rely on
communication and collaboration tools as stand-
ins for being at their desks or in meeting rooms.
There are offerings from the likes of Google,
Microsoft, and Zoho, but there are lots of great
open-source offerings, too.
I wrote recently about Keybase (https://keybase.
io) and its collaboration tools. While Keybase’s first
goal is to facilitate easy encryption tools, it offers
Slack-like teams and private chat. Keybase also
offers private, encrypted online file storage (like
Dropbox) that can be shared with individuals or
teams. Keybase recently added a Google Meet bot,
which when invoked with “!meet” creates a link to
a Google video conference.
Slack and Atlassian’s HipChat are big players,
but to get the most out of them, you have to pay.
There are two more platforms worth a mention,
though. Rocket Chat (https://rocket.chat) and
Mattermost (https://mattermost.com) are self-
hostable Slack replacements available under the
MIT license. The basic features (such as unlimited
chat history) are free; enterprise licenses are
required for more advanced features. Both have
apps for iOS, A ndroid, Linux, MacOS, and W indows.
For file-hosting, Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.
com) has long been a staple solution. It offers asuite of plugins in addition to file-
hosting and sharing capabilities.
Plugins and features include
team chat, calendars, notes,
contact management, and more.
For larger teams, I recommend
hosting Nextcloud on a reasonably
fast server and using a MySQL
database instead of the default
SQLite database back end. One of
my favorite things about Nextcloud
is the ability to use a ton of different
storage back ends for files,
including Google Drive, Amazon
S3-compatible object storage,
and more. I’ve had mixed results
with its Android and Linux desktop
clients, which can be buggy.
If you just need file storage and
sync without the extra features of
Nextcloud, SparkleShare (https://
sparkleshare.org) offers a solid
file-sharing and sync option. Both
SparkleShare and Nextcloudcan encrypt files at rest, so your
files are only available via the
application. This means that if your
remote storage is compromised,
your files remain unreadable.
For video conferencing, Google’s
Hangouts and Microsoft’s Skype
are big players, as is Zoom, which,
depending on your experience, is
either great or terrible. One of the
open-source tools that can replace
those services is Jitsi (https://
jitsi.org). It isn’t a standalone app,
but a secure video-conferencing
solution for other projects. Rocket
Chat uses Jitsi to implement its
video-conferencing capabilities.
Finally, I’d like to throw in plain
old Git (with GitHub, GitLab, or
another remote host). It’s a great
collaboration tool for text-based
files. If your work lends itself to
plain-text formats (Markdown,
Restructured Text, HTML, LaTeX,
etc.), consider using Git instead of
the common filename madness of
“document.doc,” “document-1.doc,”
“document-1-final.doc,” and so on.
There are a lot of open-source
tools to help get work done while
away from the office. Stay safe and
healthy out there.Alex Campbell is a Linux geek
who enjoys learning about
computer security.Keybase added the ability to easily
start Hangouts from team chats.