Hi everyone!

Preamble: If this is the wrong place for this post and it's more appropriate for the 'Linux - Newbie' forum please let me know. Posting here because although right now I'm just a guy with a laptop that is running Ubuntu, it isn't out of the question for me to be bringing on employees in the future who will need to share documents with me on work laptops that I provide to them.

My Question:
In your small businesses, what do you use as an alternative to Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint when you're using Linux desktop? In my case I'm using an older laptop (Dell Inspiron 5537) and put Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS on it and I want to be able to just be out of the house, away from my laptop, connect to my mobile data on my iPhone and then edit a LibreOffice/OpenOffice document that was created on my laptop. For example, if I'm home, connected to Wi-fi, on my laptop running Ubuntu, and make a spreadsheet in LibreOffice called 'Living expenses' and write down rows of my living expenses and corresponding amounts; I want to be able to leave home without my laptop, be on the train/bus, connect to my mobile data on my iPhone and then edit that same 'Living expenses' LibreOffice spreadsheet that I made earlier and have that spreadsheet be updated the way spreadsheets, documents etc are updated for companies that are using Google Drive and Microsoft Sharepoint. Would also like to be able to collaborate and share editing privileges of said document with others.

How do you solve this problem and what do you recommend I set up?

PS: My hesitation with using Google Drive is how expensive it can get once one crosses the cloud storage limit. Feel using something else, ideally something open source, would be cheaper in the long term if I need a lot more storage.

Nextcloud.

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I use SSH/SFTP plus, sometimes, sshfs along with the normal file system permissions, including occasional use of ACLs. Note that there are a lot of graphical SFTP clients, too, like Nautilus, PCManFM, Thunar, or FileZilla. At least one of the graphical SFTP clients is already available on your desktop.

I'll second NextCloud. It's quite capable and is rather easy to set up.

Of the two routes, the first one is far more flexible and powerful, so far, although it has a much higher learning curve from an end-user perspective. Yet, the knowledge there is highly reusable in many other contexts such that if you're using any GNU/Linux system intensively for a while you'll pick up the prerequisite skills anyway. If not, but you go out of your way to learn those skills, then as you gain them you can vastly increase the efficacy of your time spent using the computer as tool. With NextCloud and other web-based interfaces, the skills cap out quickly and are not so transferable. However if you just want to get going now and/or reach a non-technical group then NextCloud is an excellent choice. What are your short-term and long-term priorities?

Thank you so much for the response! At my stage and level it SEEMS NextCloud would be more appropriate but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really know

Nothing too big I feel. Short term priority would be being able to use word processors, spreadsheets like the average person does on Google Docs/Google Sheets (ie editing a spreadsheet while away from wifi but with a phone in hand).
Long term priority is I guess just being able to give a new employee that same ability. If I were to add a new employee on to the team I'd like to be able to pick up an old laptop that I got for cheap/free, throw ubuntu on it (after removing Windows) and get it so that this new employee also can collaborate with me on company documents/spreadsheets the way businesses do this today using Google Drive/Google Apps for Work or Microsoft Sharepoint.

Thanks for responding!

Any specific tutorials you would recommend for a newbie like me to get set up with NextCloud? I'm not even sure what exactly I'd google at this point. "how to set up NextCloud to replace Google Drive" ? Sorry just really new to this

Well, if you or one of your staff is doing the setup, then SFTP is still an option. You might find it worthwhile to set aside up to 30 minutes looking at how to connect to OpenSSH-server via the default file manager to see how your new employee would experience it. On the back end, you'd have to set up a shared directory for everyone to connect to.

<digression>Back through the 1990s, there was a global file sharing network, AFS, later OpenAFS, that showed up as a folder on the desktop, once the Windows/MacOS/Linux/Solaris/etc system was set up for it. Then by making new folders and setting the permissions, you could share (read-write, readonly, dropbox) that folder and its contents with anyone else who was part of that global network. It and its successor, Ceph, can operate standalone but it'd be overkill for just single small business. Or for small businesses there was Netware, which is still unbeaten in ease and performance. I guess I'm just grumbling that the options were much better at that time.</digression>

By way of background, I run a small business which (at it's core) produces documents for customers. These can be in PDF or other common office formats. There are 7 of us in 2 offices, and we collaborate on jobs and create & edit files.

What I have is simply an OpenVPN server with a SAMBA share. While offsite, people can turn on their VPN client and access the shared files in the same way as if they're working in the office. Since OpenVPN is cross-platform, it works with whatever platform the staff want to use.

We were able to work at home through the covid lockdowns without any major issues.

There is a bit more to it, (VMs, backups, etc) but that's what the setup boils down to. Not sure if that's the sort of thing you want?

This works for us because we're not a big office. I'd imagine it could be quite painful generating VPN keys for more than a handful of people... but I might be doing it the slow way.

The first URL you sent is simple but the 2nd I'm having trouble understanding. I think this is for me to dig a little deeper on my own I guess but what do you use on your smartphone then to edit the same documents that are accessible on your laptop? Do you use Collabora?

First of all thank you for responding and I apologize for just my lack of understanding. Just getting started and this whole linux and open source thing is very new to me and still a struggle.

I guess I'd like to ask that if you or any of your employees need to access and edit a file using their iPhone/Android while offsite connected to mobile data, are they able to do this? Also how much do you pay for this setup? I'm ideally looking for something that's free or very cheap in the sense that as I need more storage/have bigger needs (ie I cross the 15GB mark that Google Drive gives for free and have 20GB o=that are shared files on cloud), I can be paying less for this 20 GB than I would be if I was with Google Drive.

No problem. We all start somewhere.

The "community" edition of OpenVPN is licensed under the GPL, so it's free for commercial use. https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn

SAMBA is a free implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol under Linux. It allows users to access a common file (and/or print) share with the platform of their choice. It's also licensed under the GPL. https://www.samba.org/
We use laptops, but the concept is the same. Users have to connect to the OpenVPN server first, then they can access the shared files. There is an OpenVPN app available for both Apple and Android, so I'd say that yes it's possible to do this with a phone.

I can say with certainty that it works using mobile data with a laptop connected to a phone via "wi-fi hotspot."
I bought the hardware and pay for the internet connection. There is no other cost. The storage space is limited only by the capacity of the machine hosting the share.

For editing via smartphone? Nothing. It's a matter of the right tool for the job and hopefully no one on the clock is trying to use a time-consuming, clumsy device like a smartphone for anything complex, such as editing. It's better to wait until a laptop is available before starting such a task. Smartphones are really only suitable for passive viewing, and for that it is easy enough to make the documents web-accessible for read-only viewing by adding a web server (with or without passwords). I guess the big trick when building a custom system using the traditional a la carte approach is learning what's on the menu.