Fri 11 December 2015 by Christoph Witzany
Tools for You
The first 4 tools we present are for your personal use; they will enable you to have the experience of a cloud service withouit giving up control over your data.
While cloud services like GMail and Dropbox are convenient, there are many good reasons why you should not rely on them too much.
1. Read Mails with Mailpile
Mailpile aims at providing a state of the art email client. The project was started by Bjarni Runar Einarson of Pagekite fame.
Mailpile creates a powerful index of all your emails to make them easily searchable. It also makes it very easy to send and receive encrypted emails.
You can run Mailpile on you own machine, but if you want an even easier start, just wait for your CloudFleet Blimp. CloudFleet will use Mailpile as its email client.
Alternative solutions are Roundcube and Nylas N1.
2. Synchronize Contacts and Calendars with Radicale
Synchronizing your contacts and calendar entries across different devices can be a pain if you don't want to use Google for that. Radicale is a server that enables this using the open protocols CalDAV and CardDAV, which are understood by all modern devices.
With your CloudFleet Blimp you will get Radicale automatically.
If you don't like Radicale or just have a PHP server at your disposal, you can also use DAViCal
3. Keep Notes with Braindump
Every now and then it is necessary to scribble down a note. Be it a shopping list or the plan to take over the world, you don't want everybody to know about it. So instead of the centralized Evernote you should use Braindump.
Braindump will also be available on your CloudFleet Blimp.
Like always there are more possibilities to choose from, eg. Laverna or OpenNote.
4. Sync Files with the Server Formerly Known as Ubuntu One
Dropbox sure is convenient; but are you sure you want to store your private files with a service that has to hand it over to the authorities if requested?
Ubuntu once tried to create a service similar to Dropbox but canceled it. However they released the code to the public, giving the world a battle-tested file synchronization server that can be used to host the data at home.
Various clients for many operating systems are also available.
You can synchronize your files with your CloudFleet Blimp.
Seafile is also a product that allows you to synchronize your files.
Tools for Your Organization
What is true for you personally is just as true for your organization. The following 5 tools allow you to escape the claws of cloud services and also attain data sovereignty for your company or non-profit.
5. Collaborate on Your Code with GitLab
To develop software in a team, a good version control system is important and a central repository with a web interface makes the collaboration much easier.
The people from GitLab created a tool that makes it easy to host this at your own premises. If you ever used GitHub, you will soon find yourself at home with GitLab.
At CloudFleet we use GitLab to host the code for our internal projects.
A project with similar scope is Gogs.
6. Use Mattermost to Chat
Quick and frictionless communication is the lifeblood of every team. With Mattermost there's now a powerful competitor to the centralized Slack.
It's easy to install and if you already use GitLab, it's included.
Let's chat is another tool which we actually use at CloudFleet, as Mattermost wasn't yet ready when we started using self-hosted chat.
7. Use Taiga to Organize
No project can be successful without a place where all the information about tasks and issues is concentrated. Taiga is a modern tool for agile teams that allows you to manage your user stories, sprints and issues.
You can also add a wiki to the project and use a central user directory to authenticate your users.
At CloudFleet we use Taiga to manage our tasks, user stories and issues.
If Taiga doesn't suit your needs, OpenProject serves a similar purpose.
8. Piwik
To get data about how many people visit a web page and where they come from is of uttermost importance for every business nowadays. Most services, however, demand that you store your data with them.
Fortunately there is Piwik, a self hosted service that makes it possible to keep this essential data under your own control.
At CloudFleet we use Piwik to count the traffic on our web page without disclosing your information to Google via Google Analytics, like most web pages.
9. Discourse
Discourse is the new project by Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow and Coding Horror fame. It makes it easily possible to host a state of the art discussion forum and if you want you can use it to enable discussions on your static web pages, like on this blog.
Now it's your turn! Have you used any of the tools we outlined above? Are there any you're currently using which we haven't mentioned? Let us know in the comments, we'd love to hear from you about the tools you use to take back control over your data.