People do their best work in a state of flow, when they can move from a conversation to a document to a task without breaking their train of thought. That puts the onus on productivity vendors to make their tools work together seamlessly.
Customers running sovereign stacks tell us exactly that. As one put it: "It isn't a problem that the apps are named different things, or that they're made by different vendors. The problem is if they aren't linked."
That's what our integration team is working on, so people can stay in flow across an entire sovereign workplace.
What's shipped already
Files, with Nextcloud
Sharing a file between your chat and Nextcloud used to be a chore. You’d have to download your files and upload them straight back into the chat. Now you can connect your Nextcloud account, browse your actual folders, and share a file into a room.
Nextcloud stays the only source of truth. Rather than dozens of copies flying around with various competing edits, there’s a single file in a single place. The permissions are set for this file, in Nextcloud, once and for all.
Link previews
When you paste a link to another platform such as Nextcloud, share a Jira ticket or a GitHub PR into most chat tools, you get a rich preview. But what about private documents that are only shared with a select few people? In such a case, the link preview would be of limited use: your messaging app doesn’t know that you actually have access to the file, so it can only create a generic preview for it.
Element’s integration team has developed Authenticated Previews. You can link your accounts to your Element, and it will use them to fetch more useful previews. With it, an internal document shows its real title to the people entitled to see it, and nothing to others.
The previews also work with the composer. You see what you're about to share before you send it, rather than being caught by surprise once it makes it to the timeline.
PDF and Markdown previews in the room
Being asked to comment on a forty-page annex used to mean leaving the conversation, downloading the file, reading it somewhere else and coming back with a thought you'd half-lost on the way. It also meant that the downloaded file would linger around forever on users’ machines.
Now the document opens beside the discussion. It never leaves the sovereign workspace suite. It’s gone from the users’ machine as soon as they close the preview.
Next up…
Project management, in the timeline
Work gets decided in conversation and recorded somewhere else, and the two drift apart within a day. We're bringing work items into the room; status and assignee visible right where the discussion is happening. We’ll start with OpenProject.
Richer timeline cards
Previews were the first step. Cards are the next one; more context, and actions you can take without leaving. Documents will open as a live editor, via Collabora, rendering from the customer's own Nextcloud. So the file being edited is the same file in the same folder. Request-and-approve flows will be handled in place rather than in an email thread three hours later.
Upcoming events
The last big piece of a working day that still lives entirely elsewhere. The goal isn't a second calendar, it's that a meeting scheduled is easy to join without switching tabs or hunting for links.
The right tools for you
Your day at a glance
We're researching a home view for Element; one view of what actually needs you today, be it unread conversations, your next meeting, the files and tasks that are waiting. For anyone running Element on its own, that's a better place to start the day than an empty room list. For organisations running a full sovereign stack, it becomes a single authenticated view across the whole workplace, assembled from the tools you already pay for, using your authentication system, which in - for instance - openDesk deployments means Univention's IAM.
It's deliberately not a launcher; much like what we’ve done so far, we want the other tools to be consistently integrated into your Element, so you don’t have to think about where the information lives.
An ‘extensions store’
Having tight integrations and a comprehensive dashboard is great. But not everyone uses the same tools, so users need to be able to find and add the integrations that matter to them.
We’re currently exploring a next generation extensions store to make it simple and easy for people to install what they need.
We’re team players
One of the common traps in our industry is the Not Invented Here syndrome. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel; all the tools in sovereign workplace suites do their job well. We're not replacing the tools we integrate with. Our partners behind them move faster in their own domains than we would, and the ecosystem is better for it.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, the engine, or the safety belt, we prefer assembling the components together so the user can make it to their destination without having to build the car themselves.
With Element tying digital workspace suites together, end users switch context less and focus on what matters more. Our integrations don’t just look good: they also make everyone more efficient.
