Re: Office - open or closed?
I have to say that if I ever set up my own small business again, I'll be going NextCloud and their cloudy office (is it Collabra?) on a bunch of my own dedicated servers.
I can't see anything that I have done professionally using Google Workspace or Office 365 that I couldn't do in some way with the same kind of setup, and in a more integrated way, entirely under my own control.
In fact, I'm often amazed when I look through the plugins for NextCloud at just what it can do - OpenStreetMap equivalents of Google Maps, Asterisk SIP integration, etc.
I understand the need for a large commercial backer for big companies, but for anything I'm ultimately responsible for, I'd be going NextCloud etc.
I've managed Windows networks for 20+ years and if I was running the company I wouldn't use Windows either nowadays. MS don't care what you want any more, you get what you're given. For 10 of those years, I was self-employed and used Linux, OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), other OS equivalents etc. as my primary desktop both in work and at home.
NextCloud installs are - as far as I'm concerned - the Google Docs / Google Drive / etc. without the "Google" factor. Hell, it does a pretty good job of just being a media center / "YouTube" by throwing MP3's and MP4's into it, even auto-converting them and pulling metadata and media info, and that's a long way outside its intended usage.