Kanban boards are a great way to visually depict work at various stages of a process. This style of project management uses cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage, thus making progress checks on a project an at-a-glance experience. If you combine a Kanban board with Nextcloud, you have a powerful, in-house collaboration tool that can ease your project management tasks.
I want to show you how to install a Kanban board in Nextcloud. I’ll demonstrate with the latest release of Nextcloud (15), running on a Ubuntu Server 18.04 instance. What hosting platform you use doesn’t matter (so long as Nextcloud is running).
With that said, let’s install.
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Installing the board
We are going to install Deck, the official Nextcloud Kanban-style project management tool (which is similar to Trello). Here are the steps for installing Deck:
- Log into your Nextcloud instance with an admin account.
- Click your profile image in the upper right corner.
- Click Apps.
- Click Office & text in the left pane.
- Locate the Deck entry (Figure A)
- Click Download & enable.
- Allow the installation to complete.
Figure A
Once the app is installed, you should see a new entry for Deck in the main toolbar (Figure B).
Figure B
Using Deck
Click on the Deck icon to open the app. In the resulting window, click the Create new board button (Figure C).
Figure C
Give the new board a name, select a color for the board, and click the check mark to finish up. Your new board has been created. Click on the newly created board and start adding cards. To add a card click the + button under the default stack (Figure D).
Figure D
Give the card a name and hit the Enter button on your keyboard. Once the card is created, you can then assign it by clicking the actions button (three horizontal dots) and then clicking the Assign card to me entry (Figure E).
Figure E
Adding users
What if you’re not the only user working on a project? You need to add those users. To do that, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Deck screen. In the new pane, click the Sharing tab and then click the Select users or groups to share with dropdown (Figure F).
Figure F
Select all of the users you want to add to a project from the dropdown. Once users are added, you can assign them privileges (Figure G).
Figure G
With the users added to the project, they can then assign cards to themselves. The one caveat is that cards cannot be assigned to other users (only a user can assign a card to themselves). Multiple users can be assigned to a single card, but no user can bump another user from a card.
If you select a card, you can then (in the right pane–Figure H) add a description, add attachments and tags, and create a timeline for the card.
Figure H
And that’s all there is to adding Kanban-style project management to Nextcloud.
Better project management
Thanks to Nextcloud, you can have a powerful, in-house project management solution. With the addition of a few extra apps on your Nextcloud server, your project management tasks are made incredibly simple.