Action required: New help desk solution, emails and drive

The Neos Project Neos Team
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It’s been a while (but not that long a while), that I migrated all of our neos.io email infrastructure to Google. We needed actual IMAP accounts for each of the team members and the old solution, based on Mailgun SMTP forwards, didn’t fit our needs anymore.

Now, while Google Mail works fine, there were a few things which nagged me rather quickly:

  • the solution is, for an Open Source project, rather costly, as we pay for a G Suite account for each Neos Team member
  • the solution to handle common email addresses like hello@neos.io, conference@… etc. via Google Groups was very annoying and I think we didn’t really have an overview over who was tackling which request

So, I was looking for a new solution throughout the last months. I maybe should have gone through a more open discussion process with you folks, but in the end I thought, I’d take the risk to prepare a new solution already and give you a chance to veto if you don’t really like it.

Here’s what I did:

E-Mails

I asked @daniellienert from punkt.de if they would provide email hosting for the Neos Team. And Daniel was so kind to say yes! That means, we can move our @neos.io email accounts to punkt.de and they sponsor email hosting to the Neos project.

We haven’t taken any concrete steps with this yet, and I guess – considering the workload Daniel currently has – may start the migration after Christmas.

Files

We currently use Google Drive for the Neos project’s private files. And I also asked Daniel if punkt.de could provide a Nextcloud instance for us instead. They do! :confetti_ball:

Daniel already set up an instance for us (https://vpro0704.proserver.punkt.de) which we’ll configure during the next weeks (with a custom domain etc) and then, at some point, can use for files we need to store for the Neos Foundation and Neos Team.

Help Desk

As for coordinating team emails (hello@neos.io, conference@neos.io, security@neos.io and the Operations Team) I prepared a solution for you, which you hopefully like as well: Zammad.

Zammad is an Open Source Project (https://zammad.org) but also backed by a company which offers a Zammad SaaS (https://zammad.com). It’s a nice help desk solution, hosted in a data center in Germany, provided by a German company, which we also use internally at Flownative.

I made a deal with the folks at Zammad: Since we are an open source project, they offer the Zammad SaaS “Professional Plan” to us for the price of “Starter” (which means a 66 % discount – https://zammad.com/en/pricing). In return, they asked us they could mention Neos in a future “customer success story”.

I tested Zammad with the folks in the Neos Foundation Board, because I guess that it will help them most (for example, incoming invoices would be routed to Zammad).

I also created a Zammad user for everyone in the Neos Team. Please go to https://neos.zammad.com (the domain will change at some point) and request a new password for your user (use your neos.io email address).

New emails which are directed to the mentioned email addresses will already end up in Zammad. I downloaded all data of the original Google Groups for later reference.

Important: Please start monitoring (and answering) tickets in Zammad – emails directed to the Security Team, Conference Team and general emails to hello will now end up there!

Feedback

I know, it it’s a bit late in the process, but my gut feeling said that you wouldn’t mind a proper help desk and less costs for email hosting. However, please do give me your feedback. If it turns out that the majority of the team does not like the change, I will of course revert all the decisions I took without asking.

Happy mailing!
Robert

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PS: Zammad is now reachable via https://tickets.neos.io

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Hey @robert ,

awesome - Thanks for taking the initiative and pushing this forward :dancing_men: :dancing_women: :slight_smile: :upside_down_face: :heart: :heart:

I like it a lot :slight_smile:

One detail I am unsure about: we use lots of google sheets for organizing e.g. Neos Con - is that possible in Nextcloud? (if no, we could simply stay with our private gmail accounts and share folders like before…)

All the best,
Sebastian

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One detail I am unsure about: we use lots of google sheets for organizing e.g. Neos Con - is that possible in Nextcloud? (if no, we could simply stay with our private gmail accounts and share folders like before…)

Sure, let’s just use Google Sheets for that. Ideally, we could just leave the existing Google Sheets where they are. Maybe it’s possible to keep one paid account (Neos Team) which owns the space and convert our neos.io users to personal accounts.

If anyone knows if that’s possible or would look into that, that would be cool!

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hey robert, that sounds good! thanx a lot :heart:

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That is a great move and awesome that PunktDe is helping with the hosting knowledge and power :slight_smile:

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Thank you @robert and @daniellienert for taking care of this and providing this solution to the team! :heart:

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It’s a bit of a shame, but this whole migration was stuck for 1,5 years …

But now we have some additional incentive to work on it: Google raised prices for the Google Workspace plans. And we spend money every month on features we don’t need / use.

So let’s check the current state:

  • we are using Zammad as our help desk solution, so no action needed in that regard at the moment
  • the Nextcloud server is running at https://drive.neos.io but users and data have not been migrated yet
  • no further steps have been taken in regard to emails

I suggest that we make this work as soon as possible. But I will need some help.

Next steps regarding Nextcloud:

  • @daniellienert does anything speak against now using the Nextcloud server for real? Anything which needs to be updated or secured to make this a production server?
  • create users for everybody in the Neos Team and set up groups correctly
  • get an overview of all files we have in Google Drive
  • migrate files from Google Drive
  • check what to do with Google spreadsheets (transfer ownership to a special neos.io user?)
  • cancel Google Workspaces subscription

Looking at Google drive with my user robert@neos.io, I only see directories of the Neos Foundation. Is there someone with a better overview and access to more files? How should we tackle this – create a board with issues on Github to track which data has been migrated?

I’m not sure what happens when we cancel our Google Workspaces subscription (which is > 300 € / month at the moment). From what I read, we would loose the feature “Team Drives”. Does that mean we loose the data on these drives?

Next steps regarding emails:

  • @daniellienert does punkt.de still offer to host emails for neos.io?
  • set up mailboxes for every team member
  • set up special email addresses (conference@… etc)
  • switch DNS to the new mail server
  • every team member migrates their emails (using imapsync or their email client) to the new host
  • delete mailboxes

It’s all a big hassle, but on the other hand we are really wasting money if we keep using Google Workspaces (we really don’t need those features). So let’s get try to get this off the table together.

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I also only see the Neos Foundation shared drive. My assumption is, that all other data is still in the Google Drive that was never migrated to the Neos-Google-Org. Maybe @sebastian or @tschoeki know?

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Hey @robert

Nothing to do. The Server is treated as productive ever since. It’s also automatically updated.

I guess so :wink: At least our admins have poked me from time to time to ask if everything is alright and if the server is already live. If we want to use it, I collect the details again and we work on a migration plan.

Lets do a short call about these topics.

Cheers
Daniel

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That’s great! Today I upgraded that Nextcloud from 23.something to 24.0.4 (via the web UI). I guess I should leave that upgrade button alone in the future?

Yes, let’s have a quick call about the next steps. Ping me via Slack or give me a call when you find some time.

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Hi @robert

Thanks for taking care!

We are using Google Forms on several places on the website.
We currently want to move some of them to Neos Forms, but will need Google Forms for some special things like Neos Award - havent seen any equivalent around (could be in one special neos.io account though)

I have no access to any shared drives, but i have access to a shared folder “Neos” that we have been using for NeosCon related stuff, and it contains a lot more - i guess it is part of the shared drive you mentioned (owner of the Folder is Aske)

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Hey,

I’ve just now reached out to Aske and asked him whether he can make me the owner of the shared folder. Because then, I can backup the full folder to our Synology NAS, and during this process, also convert documents to Word files and tables to Excel files.

And we definitely need this folder for conference organization :smiley:

Then it should be much easier to migrate :slight_smile:

All the best,
Sebastian

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FYI, I copied all files from the Neos Foundation folder to Nextcloud. @tobias and @gina should have access to that already. What’s missing are all the .gdoc files. @sebastian did you find a way to migrate those (semi-) automatically?

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@daniellienert How should we proceed regarding the migration of the email accounts?

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@NeosTeam Here’s an update regarding the migration of files in Google Drive.

I downloaded, converted and de-duplicated files from all shared drives which were part of the neos.io Google Workspace organization. I uploaded all those files to Nextcloud.

Here’s a list of the drives in question:

image
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The shared drives are now deleted and cannot be accessed anymore. However I could, if needed, restore them within the next 25 days.

@sebastian I still have access to a bunch of individual files which are “shared with me”. They don’t seem to be located in one of the shared drives (because those were deleted). For example, I can still access the Neos Conference “Master Tables” containing the calculation. Can you check, where all the Neos Conference data is actually stored and upload everything to Nextcloud?

As far as I can see, the file is directly owned by Lisa and not part of the Neos workspace:

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Next steps (important!)

  • if you don’t have access yet to drive.neos.io, please say so in the internal Neos Team Slack channel and mention your Neos email address; Daniel, Sebastian, Karsten and me are currently administrators and can create new users
  • everybody in the Neos team who knows files which should exist, please log in to drive.neos.io and check that they still exist. Please report back here what you checked.

Please check files until September 21st – that’s in 7 days!

  • When we know that all files made it to Nextcloud, I would like to restructure the folders and groups in Nextcloud, to reduce the little chaos we’ve got there. It’s also important that we are able to restrict access for certain areas, for example restrict access to the Neos Award folder to the Neos Award team.

When the migration to Nextcloud is done, we can migrate emails (punkt.de needs to set up an admin ui for that) and then finally cancel the Google Workspace subscription.

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PS:

  • we should use the email address as a username for new users. There are a couple of users now which don’t follow that pattern, but we can migrate them (create a new user, delete the old one)
  • please enable Two Factor Authentication for your user as soon as possible
  • everyone in the Neos Team will also become a group administrator for the Neos Team group in Nextcloud. As far as I understand it, that means that every team member can also create a new user which is part of that group
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It seems we forgot to replace the links to the Google Forms on the bottom of Neos CMS & Flow Service Provider Listing - Neos.io – is there an equivalent with Nextcloud?

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We started preparing forms in Neos for this during the marketing sprint, but I’m also not sure how finished they are. @crydotsnake was working on that.

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I finished the form for the service providers. But so far i had no time continue working on it :confused:

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