Product · Files, storage & sync
Files on every desk,
and available offline.
Personal and shared storage with versioning, recovery and controlled sharing, plus a planned Office Unbound desktop client for Windows, macOS and Linux that keeps files available when the network is not.
Project status File storage is planned for the core-services phase and the desktop client for the client-experience phase. Nextcloud is the leading candidate; nothing on this page is available yet.
What it replaces
OneDrive, SharePoint document libraries, Google Drive and Shared Drives, and the old departmental file server.
Files are where an organization’s work accumulates. Contracts, drawings, spreadsheets, scanned records and project folders build up over years, and people expect three things of them: that they are on their laptop when they open it, that colleagues see the same version, and that nothing is lost when someone deletes the wrong folder.
This service is one of the main pillars of Office Unbound, because it is the one that ties the others together. Documents open from it, mail attachments can be sent as links to it, files shared in chat are stored in it, and the desktop client is how most people will experience the platform day to day. It is designed to give each person their own storage, to give teams and departments shared spaces with permissions that follow the directory, and to keep the whole of it auditable and recoverable.
Storage lives on infrastructure the organization or its provider chooses. That brings control over where files are and how they are backed up — and the responsibility for disks, capacity and backups that a cloud subscription hides.
Intended capabilities
What the file service and desktop client are being designed to provide. Each line shows its current status; none is available yet.
- Available Available and verified in a release
- In development Being built now
- Planned In the roadmap, not yet started
- Under evaluation Being assessed; not yet selected
| Capability | What it means | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Personal file storage | Each user’s own space, private by default, the equivalent of OneDrive or My Drive. | Planned |
| Shared business storage | Team workspaces and department folders owned by the organization rather than one person. | Planned |
| Granular permissions | View, edit, upload-only and reshare rights per person or group, inherited down folder trees. | Planned |
| File versioning | Earlier versions kept automatically and restorable by the user or an administrator. | Planned |
| Deleted-file recovery | A trash with a retention period, so deleted files and folders can be restored. | Planned |
| Sharing links | Links with optional password, expiry date and view-only or edit access. | Planned |
| External collaboration | Sharing with people outside the organization, within limits set by policy. | Planned |
| Storage quotas | Limits per user, per team workspace and per customer organization. | Planned |
| File search | Search by name and, where indexing is enabled, by content. | Planned |
| Auditability | A record of uploads, downloads, shares, permission changes and deletions. | Planned |
| Desktop synchronization | Branded sync client for Windows, macOS and Linux. | Planned |
| Selective sync | Choosing which folders are synced to a given computer. | Planned |
| Online-only files | Files listed locally but downloaded only when opened, to save disk space. | Under evaluation |
| Offline file availability | Locally available files remain usable without a connection. | Planned |
| Sync conflict handling | Conflicting edits kept side by side and reported to the user. | Planned |
| Mobile access | Browsing, uploading and sharing files from phones and tablets. | Planned |
Where files live
Four kinds of space, because files belong to different owners and the difference matters when people change roles or leave.
Personal storage
Drafts and working files belonging to one person. Private unless shared. When the person leaves, an administrator decides what is transferred and what is deleted.
Team workspaces
Shared folders for a project or team, owned by the organization. Membership comes from a directory group, so files stay when individuals move on.
Department folders
Long-lived structure such as Finance, HR or Operations, with permissions that can narrow further down the tree for sensitive subfolders.
External shares
Links and guest access for customers, suppliers and advisors — controlled by policy, time-limited where required, and logged.
Permissions, sharing and recovery
The controls a business needs before it trusts a shared drive with its records.
- Group-based access
- Folder access is granted to directory groups as well as individuals. Adding someone to the Sales group gives them the Sales workspace; removing them takes it away, without anyone editing folder permissions by hand.
- Sharing policy
- Administrators decide whether external links are allowed at all, whether they need a password or an expiry date, and which groups may create them.
- Versions
- Each save creates a version. Users restore their own; administrators can restore on their behalf. How many versions are kept, and for how long, is a policy setting that trades recoverability against storage.
- Deleted files
- Deleted items go to a trash for a defined period before they are removed. Recovering a deleted shared folder should not require restoring a backup of the whole server.
- Quotas
- Limits per person, per workspace and, for MSPs, per customer, with usage visible to administrators before it becomes a problem.
- Audit trail
- Who uploaded, downloaded, shared, moved or deleted what, and when. Logs feed the platform’s central audit view.
Version history and the trash protect against ordinary mistakes. They live on the same storage as the files themselves, so they do not protect against hardware failure, ransomware on the server or a lost site. Independent backups remain essential, and backup design is part of every deployment.
The Office Unbound desktop client
For most people, the file service is a folder on their computer. Office Unbound intends to offer a branded desktop client for Windows, macOS and Linux that makes that folder simple to set up and dependable to use.
Goals for the client
Simple installation
Standard installers for each operating system, deployable silently by IT across many machines.
Guided or one-click setup
The server address and settings supplied by the organization, so users are not asked for URLs.
Automatic account enrollment
The account is configured when the user signs in, with no separate sync password.
Single sign-on
Sign-in through the platform’s identity provider, with the same MFA as the web.
Background synchronization
Changes sync quietly as files are saved, without the user starting anything.
Clear sync status
An icon and file overlays that say whether everything is up to date, still uploading or needs attention.
Conflict reporting
A plain explanation of which files conflicted and what the user can do about it.
Managed updates and policies
Client updates and settings controlled by administrators, not left to each user.
Built on established client technology
Writing a file synchronization client from scratch is a long and risky undertaking: the hard parts are correctness under interrupted connections, large trees of files, file locking on Windows, and the operating systems’ own integration points for placeholder files. Mature open-source clients have already worked through much of that.
The intention is to reuse established open-source client technology where it is suitable — the Nextcloud desktop client is the leading candidate, given that Nextcloud is the leading storage candidate — and to add Office Unbound branding, enrollment and policy on top. Whether that is done as configuration, a branded build or a deeper fork depends on licensing, integration and support review, which is part of the current evaluation phase.
Mobile access is planned through mobile applications for browsing, uploading and sharing files; how those are delivered is subject to the same review.
Under evaluation Desktop client technology
Offline access, precisely
Offline work remains possible for files that are on the computer when the connection drops. That is a narrower promise than “the platform works offline”, and it is the honest one.
Expected to work offline
- Opening and editing files that are synced to the computer, in desktop applications
- Creating new files and folders inside the synced folder
- Renaming, moving and deleting synced files, applied to the server on reconnection
- Files a user has marked to be kept offline, even when online-only files are in use
Not expected to work offline
- Opening files that are online only and were never downloaded
- Browser-based document editing and real-time co-editing
- Creating or changing share links, and seeing others’ latest changes
- Search across the organization’s storage
- Chat, meetings and other services that need the server
Office Unbound does not promise that cloud workflows operate offline. The desktop client is intended to keep locally available files usable during an outage and to reconcile changes afterwards. Permission changes made on the server while a laptop is offline take effect when it reconnects, and a file removed from someone’s access will be removed from their computer at that point.
When two edits collide
Sync conflicts are unavoidable in any system that allows offline edits: two people change the same file while one of them is disconnected, or the same person edits a file on a laptop and a desktop. There is no safe automatic merge for a spreadsheet or a drawing, so the design rule is simple — never silently discard anyone’s work.
When the client finds that a file changed both locally and on the server, it is intended to keep the server version in place, save the local version alongside it as a clearly named conflict copy, and tell the user which file is affected. The user, or the file’s owner, then decides which to keep. Administrators should be able to see unresolved conflicts across the organization, because a conflict copy nobody notices is a quiet way to lose work.
Browser co-editing avoids most conflicts for documents, because everyone edits the same live session. Encouraging that for shared documents, and keeping offline editing for the cases that need it, is part of the guidance the platform will ship with.
Storage on infrastructure you run
File storage is usually the largest consumer of disk in the platform and the part that grows fastest. Deployments will need to plan capacity for current data, versions and trash, growth, and backups held separately. The initial deployment target is Linux virtual machines on Proxmox VE, with storage design — local disks, shared storage or object storage — chosen to suit the size of the organization.
Moving files in
OneDrive, SharePoint libraries, Google Drive and Shared Drives are all intended migration sources, with folder structure, supported metadata and permission mapping. Permissions rarely map one-to-one — sharing models differ between platforms — so the planned assessment reports what will change before files move. Native Google Docs files need conversion.
Need offline access to work for your team?
Tell us how your people use files today — laptops, shared drives, field work, large files. It shapes how the desktop client is built and tested.