Usually, new years come with many changes and reflections of the past year. ViOffice is no different. This blogpost looks at the achievements of the past year, what has changed and what is planned for 2023.
ViOffice in 2022
For ViOffice, the past year meant above all improving the existing offers and concepts and responding even more to the wishes of our customers. In addition, we were able to keep prices stable for our customers despite the strong general financial pressure in the digital sector and are still able to offer affordable, privacy-protecting and easy-to-use services with a very good price-performance ratio.
Precisely because prices have risen considerably in all areas of life in the past year, we have consciously decided not to burden our customers even more financially and have used other ways to reduce costs and make even more efficient use of server resources.
A new addition since October is our hosting offer for your own Fediverse servers such as Mastodon. As with all our other services, we offer a cost-effective, reliable hosting plan in Germany with 100% green energy.
Since May 2022, our newsletter “Open Tech” has offered gratis added value for everyone, whether existing customers or other interested parties. Here, current events in digital politics and the digital economy are noted and placed in the context of our regular blog posts.
Cloud in new style
Thanks to the seemingly tireless work of the Nextcloud community, we are once again able to offer our customers the latest usability improvements in the ViOffice Cloud at the turn of the year.
Design
The first thing that stands out is that the web interface now has a new look. The experience is now much more personalised, based on function cards and even more rounded than before. The old side menu has given way to a somewhat clearer tab-based menu at the top of the screen. This means you can always see at a glance which application you are currently in. And switching between the functions of the cloud is now quicker and easier than before.
Image editing and photo albums
The standard picture viewer has now also been considerably expanded and allows simple editing of photos, such as cropping, marking and drawing, simple photo filters or adjusting brightness and contrast. Photo albums can now also be created here and shared with others.
Talk
The chat and video conferencing application “Talk” has also received some usability improvements. For example, sent links are automatically transformed into small tiles that show a preview of the respective web page. Links pointing to content within the ViOffice Cloud (for example files or maps in Deck) also get a preview of the specific content.
A change that can be useful especially in large group chats with many participants is the possibility to start calls without notifying all members of the chat, for example if only a few people need to attend the video conference. The “do not disturb” function can now be set on a time basis, for example, to take into account only working days and hours.
Groupware
The email application built into ViOffice Cloud has received significant speed improvements in addition to some drastic changes to its appearance. Furthermore, there is now the possibility to set absence notes and not to be informed about newly received emails for certain periods of time.
Those who sort contacts within the ViOffice Cloud into “organisations” can now create organisational charts and organisational hierarchies to always find the right contact person.
Future plans
We have also planned some innovations for 2023 to make the user experience even better and simpler. While we have been focused on expanding our portfolio to provide a diverse offering for the (home) office, this year we want to focus on simplifying our processes.
Simpler booking processes
We have created clear forms that can be used to contact us easily. A formalised booking process for our services currently also works via this. This process should become even simpler in the future. For example, we would like to set up a so-called simple sign-up for our subscription offers, which will automatically set up the selected subscription and allow it to be used immediately.
Website: Portfolio
Since our founding, our portfolio has constantly evolved. To make it even easier to find your way around our site, we are currently restructuring our portfolio pages. A first step in this direction was the creation of transparent price tables for our various subscriptions. We are also currently adapting our help centre.
Open Tech Newsletter
Since May last year, we have been sending out our free monthly Open Tech Newsletter. In addition to current information on digital topics, especially data protection, privacy and open source, we will share discount codes in the future that will make our services even more affordable. So sign up for our newsletter now to benefit from the attractive discounts and not miss out on any more information.
Do you have any other suggestions for us? Don’t hesitate to contact us directly by email or on our social media channels! We are always happy to receive interesting feedback.
Pascal founded ViOffice together with Jan in the fall of 2020. He mainly takes care of marketing, finance and sales. After his degrees in political science, economics and applied statistics, he continues to work in scientific research. With ViOffice, he wants to provide access to secure software from Europe for everyone and especially support non-profit associations in their digitalization.
Jan is co-founder of ViOffice. He is responsible for the technical implementation and maintenance of the software. His interests lie in particular in the areas of security, data protection and encryption.
In addition to his studies in economics, later in applied statistics and his subsequent doctorate, he has years of experience in software development, open source and server administration.