How a Hamburg volleyball club keeps its teams in sync with ONLYOFFICE

Running a sports club takes more than a whistle and a good serve. Behind every match, training session, and sponsor deal sits a mountain of paperwork, and someone has to keep it all organized. For the volleyball department of Niendorfer TSV in Hamburg, Germany, ONLYOFFICE Docs and Nextcloud make that job a whole lot easier. Let’s look at how this volunteer-run club moved from email chaos to smooth, real-time collaboration.

Meet Niendorfer TSV

Niendorfer TSV has been part of Hamburg’s sporting life since 1919. That’s over a century of people coming together to move, compete, and have fun. The volleyball department alone brings together around 200 members spread across ten teams.

Photo by Çağlar Oskay on Unsplash

The club runs on volunteers, and it has a warm, familiar feel to it. People know each other, help each other, and pitch in wherever they can. But that friendly, hands-on spirit also brings a very practical challenge: how do you keep so many people and so much information in order without a big IT team behind you?

The challenge: too many file versions, too little order

Before ONLYOFFICE, the club’s biggest headache was collaboration. Files were emailed back and forth between volunteers. You can probably guess what happened next. Files multiplied, versions clashed, and everyone kept asking the same question: “Wait, who has the latest one?”

On top of that, the club had a few clear priorities that made the search for a better tool more specific:

• Data privacy first. As a sports club, keeping members’ data on their own infrastructure matters a great deal. Storing sensitive information on a US-based cloud service simply didn’t fit that principle, especially with GDPR in mind.
• Mobile access for volunteers. Many volunteers work mostly from their phones, so any solution had to feel just as comfortable on a small screen.
• Reliable Microsoft Office compatibility. The club regularly exchanges files with other clubs, associations, and sponsors, so documents needed to open and look right every time.

What they really wanted was simple: genuine simultaneous editing, without the mess.

Why ONLYOFFICE won them over

The club first discovered ONLYOFFICE through the office options built right into Nextcloud, which they already used for the volleyball department. When you go looking for a way to edit documents together inside Nextcloud, ONLYOFFICE Docs stands out immediately, so it was a natural place to start.

They didn’t stop at the first option, though. Two realistic alternatives were on the table: Google Drive and Collabora. Google was ruled out quickly. A US cloud service clashed with the club’s commitment to keeping member data on its own servers. That left two self-hosted candidates: Collabora and ONLYOFFICE.

ONLYOFFICE came out on top for a few clear reasons:

• Excellent Microsoft Office compatibility, so files shared with sponsors and other clubs always looked the way they should.
• A modern, familiar interface. Most volunteers already know the Word and Excel look, which meant practically no learning curve.
• A clean Nextcloud integration that made everything feel like one connected workspace.

For a volunteer-run organization, that combination felt the most productive by far.

How the club uses ONLYOFFICE every day

Once ONLYOFFICE was in place, the old email ping-pong disappeared. Now volunteers open a document and work on it together, in real time.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Meeting minutes get written and reviewed collaboratively, so there’s always one clear, up-to-date version.
• Team lists stay current without endless email chains.
• Sponsor materials and concepts are polished together, keeping everyone on the same page.
• Presentations in PPTX come together quickly and simply, ready to share.
• Training plans are created hand-in-hand with different coaches, so everyone contributes to the same plan.

The result is a shared, organized space where the right file is always the right file, no guessing required.

A setup that just works

You might expect self-hosting to be complicated, but the club found it pleasantly straightforward.

They run ONLYOFFICE Docs on their own Hetzner server, tucked behind a Caddy reverse proxy, and connect it to Nextcloud using the official integration app. Once the Document Server is reachable over HTTPS, the integration essentially just works.

The club keeps both ONLYOFFICE Docs and Nextcloud on the latest version, and updates have been smooth throughout. Nothing dramatic, no surprises, just reliable software doing its job.