Ever since I first used Microsoft Outlook, I’ve looked for ways to organize my calendar, contacts, and notes. Whether it was a paper planner, a Palm Pilot, or the current method of choice, a smartphone, the ability to organize my life at my fingers is something I enjoy doing. Once companies like Yahoo and Google started offering their own PIM services, it just made sense to use them in tandem with my phone.
Now that I’m weaning myself away from the Big Tech companies and their services, I needed to find an alternative. Fortunately, there is a cloud based PIM service, Nextcloud, which is open source and, should I wish, something I could host on my own hardware and network.
Not only does Nextcloud offer the same calendar, contacts, and notes management as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, it also features a file syncing service similar to Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive. Unlike the big corporate services, Nextcloud is fully open source, secure, and has many hosts around the world to choose from. I am currently trying out on of those hosts which offers 8GB of storage under their free tier. If everything works well enough, and I believe it will, my next step is to spin up my own Nextcloud host on my own network and take full control of my data.
You can find out more about Nextcloud at https://nextcloud.com/.
