During the end of 2016 we watched the important development of Nextcloud as an integral platform among the storage and synchronization options online, taking a different development path from it’s predecessor ownCloud. Currently Nextcloud counts with a wide variety of features that allow building an workflow and work environment high scalable preserving the autonomy, security and privacy of the user’s data unlike most of the services like OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive among others. Some of the most used features we can deploy are,
| Calendar Personalized Calendar(s) on line through multiple devices  |
| Contacts Hosting and managing of contacts list across several devices.  |
| Spreed Videoconferencing service on Nextcloud  |
| CODE Office service by Collabora/LibreOffice on-line for the development edition.  |
| Nextant Search engine app for complete and specialized search text.  |
On this post we’ll focus on Nextant.
What is it and how it works for me?
As a one liner,
Nextant, is the application that allows connect Nextcloud with Apache Solr, a high level dedicated search engine.
Let us elaborate on this. By storing a large number of files in our cloud, we find the need to establish an order in the files we store, so that we can continue to store them in an organized way. However, when the number of files continues to grow, this creates some difficulty in locating files between the different folders where we place them. That’s where Nextant together with Apache Solr make the difference.
Nextant & Apache Solr
This combination allows to scan and index all the files inside your session, allowing finding not only the file names, current behavior for the built-in search engine, but also allows to find specific text inside the files without the having the need to open it one by one.
With Nextant we can any needle on any haystack.
Indexing details are easily setup on the administration interface, allowing a wide setup setting options. On the other hand Nextant use is really simple by using the conventional search bar.
Where does it index files?
With Nextant it is possible to find text inside your files and virtually find it any folder that is accessible by the Nextcloud web interface.
- Personal directory
- Shared directories by other users
- Shared files from other Nextcloud instances (federation)
- External storage devices
- FTP
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- ownCloud
- WebDAV
So if you can access the file on your server or through an external service, Nextant could be configured to index the text of those directories hence it will find them on any folder.
What kind of file have support?
There is a wide support of files in which you can search for information, some of them could be difficult to believe that there is embedded text as is the case of images or audio, where the text embedded in the files is usually only accessible with a specific software. Some of the supported files are,
- Office Document (Microsoft Office / LibreOffice)
- PDF /ePub / RTF Files
- XML / HTML Files
- Audio Files (MP3, FLAC, OGG, etc.)
- Graphic Files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc.)
OCR Support
The feature exists, nevertheless it is still experimental, to enable support for OCR, optical character recognition, in order to find text on images and scanned files. This feature benefits from the libraries for scanning software to recognize and index text, just as a conventional scanning software would do OCR, nevertheless this kind of recognition is limited even for some commercial solutions. 
What can i use it for?
There is a huge amount of implementation areas that gets improved by the implementation of a Nextcloud & Nextant server running. Generally we speak of those organizations or departments who handle big amounts of data.
- Office and Business
- Accounting firms
- Legal offices
- Sales Departments
- Human Resources Departments
- High schools / College
- School Service Departments
- Software Developers
By mention some.
Future
This 2017 Nextcloud is emerging as the most advanced platform for storage, distribution and file synchronization services in free software and one of the most complete platforms in the market. Demonstrating a special emphasis on the security, control and privacy of users and their information. In Software, IT & Networks Ltd , we specialize in the implementation of Nextcloud servers for professionals, SMEs and organizations with the functions that your department or team needs to improve their productivity.
Contact us and we can gladly advise you and resolve the doubts your specific needs generate.