More than email — calendars, contacts, and Talk in your Oneva workspace

People sometimes think of Oneva as "private email with files." That undersells it.

When you set up your workspace, you also get a complete groupware suite. Calendar, contacts, video calls, chat, notes, tasks. All of them, all integrated, all yours.

Here's what you actually get the moment your workspace is provisioned.

Calendar

A real calendar, not a calendar app pretending to be useful.

• Multiple calendars per user — work, personal, projects, whatever you want, color-coded
• Sharing — share a calendar with your team, or make a calendar publicly viewable via a link
• Meeting invitations — send invites with proper iCalendar attachments. Recipients on Outlook, Gmail, or Apple Calendar see them as native invites and can RSVP.
• Free/busy — when scheduling a meeting, see when your team members are available without seeing the details of their appointments
• Recurring events — daily, weekly, monthly, "every second Tuesday" — all the patterns you'd expect
• Reminders and notifications — push, email, or both
• Time zones — handles them properly when you're traveling or working with people abroad

Best of all: it speaks CalDAV, the open standard. Your iPhone calendar syncs to it natively. So does your Mac. Android (with DAVx⁵), Thunderbird, Evolution — all of them. Set it up once and your appointments are everywhere.

Contacts

The same story for contacts.

• Address books for personal and shared contacts
• Photos, addresses, phone numbers, custom fields — full vCard support
• Groups — for mailing lists or team rosters
• Birthday calendar — your contacts' birthdays automatically appear in your calendar
• Auto-completion in Mail — start typing a name, your Oneva contacts come up
• Sync to your phone via CardDAV — same as calendar, native on iPhone and Android

When someone in your team adds a customer's contact details, those details are immediately available to everyone (in the shared address book). No more passing vCards around as email attachments.

Talk: video calls, screen sharing, chat

This is the one that surprises people. Oneva includes a full video calling and chat platform — comparable to Zoom or Microsoft Teams for everyday use, without a separate subscription.

For chat:

• One-to-one and group conversations
• File sharing inline
• Mentions and notifications
• Persistent history (it's stored in your workspace)
• Searchable

For calls:

• Audio and video calls with screen sharing
• Background blur
• Recording (saved to your workspace)
• Guest links — invite someone outside your workspace to a call without them needing an account

For meetings:

• Schedule a Talk room as part of a calendar event
• Recurring meeting rooms (a permanent room for your weekly standup, for example)
• Lobby/waiting room
• Moderation controls

Talk runs on your own server with a high-performance backend for media, so the video and audio don't bounce through some third party. It uses standard WebRTC, so it works in any modern browser without installing anything.

For day-to-day team communication, this can replace both Slack and Zoom for many small teams.

How it all fits together

The point isn't that you get a calendar app, plus a contacts app, plus a chat app. It's that they're all part of the same workspace, with the same login, sharing the same data.

A few examples of what that means in practice:

• Calendar invite arrives in your inbox: You see it in the Mail app with a one-click "accept/decline" button. Accept it, and the event shows up in your calendar immediately — because it's the same workspace.
• Replying to an email from a new contact: Their address gets remembered in your contacts. Next time you start typing their name in the To field, autocomplete finds them.
• Sharing a file with a colleague over chat: Drop the file into a Talk conversation. They click it. It opens in Collabora directly, in the same browser tab as the chat.
• Scheduling a meeting: Pick a time when your team is free (using the calendar's free/busy view). Send the invite. The invite includes a Talk link. Everyone can join with one click.

All of this happens without any of your data leaving your workspace. There's no "Talk integration" reaching out to a third party. There's no calendar sync going to Google. There's no contact backup uploading to Apple. Everything is in your workspace, on your server, in Helsinki.

Sync to every device

Calendar via CalDAV. Contacts via CardDAV. Mail via IMAP/SMTP. Talk via the web (or its mobile apps). Files via WebDAV or the Nextcloud Desktop sync client.

These are all open standards, meaning your phone and your laptop already speak them. You don't need to install Oneva's app on every device — the apps you already use will connect directly. We'll cover that in the next post.

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So that's your workspace: not just email, not just files, but the complete set of tools a small team needs to run a business or a household — without a sprawl of subscriptions to nine different companies.

Tomorrow: the part where you find out that switching to Oneva might require even less than you think. Most of the apps you already use on your phone and computer will work with Oneva immediately. You don't have to learn anything new.