Have you ever thought about self hosting your own collaborative whiteboard on The Edge?

Up until recently I was convinced that collaborating live with others through the means of a modern and well performing infinite canvas featuring wide support of shapes and image art, one that would be self hosted on The Edge, was merely impossible.

The solution turned out to be unexpectedly simple and elegant thanks to Nextcloud and draw.io.

What is a good whiteboard software solution like?

You may know some of the commercial solutions for collaborative whiteboards. I have experience with some of them, so I knew what I valued in a whiteboard application and I had to find one matching the criteria below.

Criteria for whiteboard applications

• Open source project
• Actively maintained project
• Web access to whiteboards
• Basic management of a collection of whiteboards
• Live collaboration support
• Smooth performance with 5-10 active participants
• Rich selection of shapes and connectors
• Support for embedding media (images, audio, video)
• Zoom in/zoom out of the canvas

Searching, searching, searching… Searching…

My attempts to find even a single candidate were always in vain. Open source was a deal breaker and all of the decent whiteboard web applications turned out to be hosted commercial software.

I should admit that I was also looking for solutions in a bit of a narrow minded way. “Self hosting on The Edge is all about self hosting software, isn’t it?” Looks like this was an unconscious bias of mine and I was truly looking for a standalone whiteboard web application ticking all the boxes.

How about a different approach?

Eventually it dawned on me that I haven’t explored integrations with existing applications running on The Edge at all. It didn’t take much and I found the Draw.io app for Nextcloud on the Nextcloud marketplace.

Nextcloud is extremely extensible through apps. Every Nextcloud server instance connects to a public marketplace in order for administrators to discover and easily install apps and offers tooling for app management to administrators.

Nextcloud + draw.io = solution

In this particular case, installing the Draw.io app required searching quickly for “draw.io” and a single button click in the app management administrative user interface of the Nextcloud instance.

Once the app was installed, Nextcloud allowed for the creation of a couple of distinct file types related to Draw.io.

• Diagrams
• Whiteboards

The whiteboards come with full support for live collaboration. When a whiteboard file is open, Nextcloud starts a collaborative editor. If the file is shared with more collaborators, they can join. This is all done through Nextcloud as a file management tool.

Nextcloud also offers link sharing with and without password. In this way the Nextcloud users can collaborate with virtually everyone on the Internet.

The trade-off

It’s all great, isn’t it? There is one caveat, though. draw.io is not open source software. This would usually be a NO-NO by default. However draw.io and more precisely its commercial implementation diagrams.net has been regarded high by the software engineering community across the globe. They have always provided us with a good service free of charge. Now, I usually have many questions around businesses providing its customers with services free of charge…

In this particular case the risk is relatively low due to the client-side nature of draw.io and also to the fact that the Nextcloud app installs a local copy of the draw.io static web application. This means that all of the data is stored in Nextcloud and processed on The Edge without dependencies to any third party services.

No doubt, the opportunity to collaborate live on a feature-rich whiteboard unlocks many exciting possibilities, thus significantly increasing the value of The Liberated Edge. This said we will keep looking for open source solutions in this space.

Reminder: self hosting Nextcloud on The Edge

If you don’t self host Nextcloud on The Edge yet, you are strongly recommend to follow our Nextcloud installation guide. Bear in mind that the setup is not exactly trivial and proper knowledge is key.