Nextcloud has developed a desktop app for its Euro-Office-based productivity applications, filling a gap in the software suite that it pitches as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office.

Nextcloud, one of the backers of the Euro-Office initiative, integrated the software into its Nextcloud Office suite in June. Until now, it’s been accessible via a web browser or mobile app.

The new desktop client lets users edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations locally, and sync files online for collaborative editing. It will be available for Linux, macOS, and Windows in the coming weeks.

“For organizations and individuals who prefer a traditional desktop experience, this closes one of the last gaps between Euro-Office and Microsoft Office, without handing control of their data to a non-European vendor,” Nextcloud said in a press release.

Rather than a standalone application suite, Euro-Office is designed as an integration component that’s embedded into productivity applications, such as Nextcloud Hub. Euro-Office handles document editing, while other elements such as storage and permissions managed by the wider platform.

The open-source project, which is built on OnlyOffice’s codebase, is backed by Nextcloud as well as Eurostack, Ionos, Office.eu, Proton, XWiki, and others. More than 40 individuals have contributed code to Euro-Office, according to Nextcloud, with around 15% of contributions from outside of the organizations directly involved in project.

Euro-Office supports OOXML file formats for compatibility with Microsoft Office, as well as OpenDocument Format (ODF) files, including ODT, ODS and ODP. The Document Foundation, which is responsible for development of LibreOffice, another open-source productivity suite, has previously questioned the Euro-Office initiative’s preference for Microsoft file formats over ODF.

Organizations using Euro-Office include Germany’s Deutsche Telekom Security and Destek, a Turkish IT consultancy, according to Nextcloud. Other customers in countries such as France, Switzerland, and Philippines are currently evaluating the software.

But it’s still early days for Euro-Office. Open-source software initiatives often face a challenge in gaining traction among a broad enterprise audience, said Martha Bennett, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.

“Euro-Office hasn’t really proven itself at the kind of scale that large enterprises are looking for. That’s of course not unique to Euro-Office; all potential open-source alternatives face the same issue,” she said.

“Obviously, it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation — without somebody taking the leap, it’s not possible to provide that proof.”

Nextcloud Hub Summer 26 updates

Among the other announcements with the Summer 26 updates are changes to management of teams within Nextcloud Hub. An updated Nextcloud Teams app, which is now available in the app menu, provides users with an overview of the teams they belong to. Each team features a folder with shared resources such as files and tasks, which Nextcloud notes is similar to Microsoft’s approach with Teams and SharePoint.

Nextcloud now also enables the creation of team-owned files, starting with Nextcloud Collectives and Deck, with additional apps in future. The aim is to ensure that all team members can access a file, even if the creator leaves the team workspace. For admins, there are new tools to view and manage team folders, including configuring storage quotas.

Among the other announcements are updates to Nextcloud Text — a lightweight text editor available across several apps — with version comparisons, footnotes, and references available throughout a document, and inline comments. Nextcloud Tables, a database app, now has relational columns that link data in cells across multiple tables, and the ability to import and export table structure — such as columns, views, and table-based apps — without changing data.

With Nextcloud’s AI Assistant, users can now upload an image and ask questions about it or translate text, while the chatbot will also recall information across conversations.

UI improvements include a revamped search experience that displays results from across Nextcloud Hub files, messages, and events, with filter options such as date range and people. App menu icons have been updated to make apps easier to recognize, and new animations throughout the interface make navigation and interactions “feel more fluid and easier to follow,” said Nextcloud.

AWS is betting that AI agents need a different interface as they move beyond answering prompts and start working autonomously in the background.

The company has open-sourced Pizza Bot, a self-hosted application that gives users an inbox for managing work delegated to AI agents, with separate threads for ongoing tasks and a queue for work that is completed or needs human input, rather than keeping the management of agents restricted inside a conventional chat window.

The rationale, according to AWS, is that background agents do not always need a user’s attention while they work, and an inbox model will let users hand off longer-running tasks, return to them later, and see which jobs are complete or require intervention.

Under the hood

That approach is reflected in how the inbox organizes work with the help of an “All” tab that contains the history of each task or conversation, including the agent’s messages and work performed, the “Unread” tab that flags completed work that users have yet to review, and an “Action” tab that surfaces tasks paused while waiting for user input or approval.

The inbox interface also has a panel named Activity that shows users how an agent handled a particular task along with the transcript, AWS wrote in a blog post introducing Pizza Bot.

AWS’ inbox-oriented rationale also extends to Pizza Bot’s architecture.

It uses LangChain’s Deep Agents as the harness and LangGraph as the stateful runtime, with a combination of the two allowing an agent to checkpoint its progress as it works, preserving its messages, tool activity and current state so a task can be paused and resumed rather than being tied to a live chat session, the hyperscaler wrote.

Pizza Bot’s server sits on top of that stack, connecting the agent runtime with the user interface, skills, MCP servers and the model provider, with developers able to choose from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini and Amazon Bedrock, as well as local models through Ollama, it added.

As for its out-of-the-box capabilities, the application comes with skills for working with files, browsing the web and delegating tasks to specialist agents. Developers can also add existing Agent Skills and MCP servers to give the agents access to other tools and services, the hyperscaler wrote.

Enterprise integration could remain a hurdle

However, analysts were not too convinced that Pizza Bot’s out-of-the-box skills and support for existing tools will make its implementation easier for enterprises.

While the out-of-the-box capabilities and added support for existing skills saves enterprise teams the time to build the application, it leaves out the integration work required to make it work, said Bhupendra Chopra, chief revenue officer at IT consulting firm Kanerika.

“Integration is where most of the money in an enterprise agent deployment goes. A sales or finance team gets value from an agent when it can read and update CRM, email and ERP, and each of those systems needs a connector someone has to build, secure and maintain,” Chopra pointed out.

Pizza Bot’s integration could be further complicated by the application’s lack of support or any SLA, according to Manoj Chandra Jha, principal analyst at Nord-IQ Research. That means the integration and operational burden ultimately falls on enterprises, who would be responsible for running, securing and maintaining the open source software themselves, Jha said.

Rise in enterprise productivity likely

But for enterprises willing to take on that integration work, the inbox-oriented approach could improve productivity.

“It’s a meaningful shift because it changes the economics of delegating work to agents. A chat interface requires a person’s attention throughout the task, while an inbox brings them in only when their judgment is needed, much like how executives delegate work to their teams,” Chopra said.

“Coding agents have already demonstrated this model, where an engineer assigns an issue and reviews the resulting pull request. Pizza Bot extends that approach to tasks such as meeting preparation and follow-ups,” Chopra added.

Further, the analyst pointed out that the inbox-oriented approach could give enterprise teams a clearer window into how scheduled tasks perform.

“For scheduled tasks, having the results delivered as threads gives users a way to track what happened in the background and spot failures that might otherwise go unnoticed,” Chopra said.

Out of sight, out of mind

There are risks with this approach, however: “The inbox model can make bad work less visible. When somebody is watching an agent in a chat window, they can see it going off the rails,” said Phil Fersht, CEO of HFS Research.

In contrast, when hundreds of tasks are running quietly in the background, users may not see an agent making mistakes until the task is complete or an exception requires their attention, potentially making problems harder to catch early, Fersht said.

That reduced visibility can also create approval fatigue, according to Chopra.

“An agent sending back dozens of threads with multiple approval requests can condition users to approve them without reading them closely,” Chopra said.

There is also a risk in the delay between an agent preparing an action and a user approving it: “Information that was current when the agent paused may no longer be valid hours later, potentially resulting in an outdated CRM update or a meeting invite for a slot that is no longer available,” he said. “An assumption that might be caught in a live chat can go unchallenged as the agent continues building on it and consuming model resources. Scheduled runs can also add costs without anyone watching them in real time.”

Those disadvantages can be countered by designing processes with fewer, better-timed approval points, and verifying that the underlying data is still current before allowing an action to execute, he said.

Adoption likely to start with technical teams

Such tradeoffs are likely to shape where Pizza Bot gains traction.

“Adoption will likely be bottom-up, with individual technologists and small platform teams drawn to Pizza Bot’s control and standards-based design,” Jha said. “Risk-averse industries, especially ones in the regulated sectors, and business users with limited technical expertise, however, are likely to approach the application more cautiously,” he added.

That could leave Pizza Bot occupying a more targeted role in the enterprise, as a way for technical teams to experiment with asynchronous agents and new ways of delegating work, rather than an immediate replacement for the governed interfaces and managed services enterprises typically use for business-critical processes, he said.

This article first appeared on InfoWorld.