In this series of blog articles, we want to give voice to customers who take the time to tell us how and why they use Nextcloud in their daily operations, putting it into context within their industry.
Today we have the pleasure to have with us Grégoire Lambadarios, director of France Madrid.
France Madrid has been a customer since February 2025. They had a mixed collaboration environment composed of a free-tier Google Drive and a Nextcloud instance, hosted at a local provider based in Cataluña.
RCA Systems has provided them with a single collaboration environment with file sync and share, collaborative edition, videoconferencing and more. One of the most important features for France Madrid was being able to search inside the documents, with Full Text Search: this is something we were able to provide from day 1 as it offered in RCA Cloud, our managed Nextcloud service.
Today France Madrid is carrying out all remote classes on Nextcloud Talk and securely collaborates on servers hosted in Spain.
Grégoire, can you present France Madrid and your position within the company?
France Madrid is a French language academy and cultural club. We are an integrated center offering French classes—from beginner to bilingual levels. Our classes are available for adults, children, youth, companies, private tutoring, intensive courses… essentially everything typical. We always combine language with culture, striving to maintain an active cultural events calendar. This allows us to offer students immersion experiences and authentic opportunities to practice French actively.
I am the director, which means I have to be aware of everything and oversee that everything runs smoothly. We are based in a central district of Madrid, between the Bilbao and Quevedo metro stations and we’ll be celebrating our 20th anniversary very soon.
Why did you choose Nextcloud as your collaboration platform?
It was somewhat accidental: a friend told us about open-source systems seven years ago. From then on, everything changed for us. Philosophically, I believe these systems should be used more widely, as we would gain significantly by implementing them consistently. When I discovered Nextcloud and saw what it could do, I immediately thought: “This is exactly what we need.” Naturally, everyone uses more well-known platforms, and convincing people to adopt this solution—especially with all its interdependent services—was not easy. But we’re already quite “Nextcloudized” at this point and we’re very happy about it.
How does Nextcloud assist in the day-to-day operations at France Madrid?
For those familiar with and using Google Drive, it’s essentially the same. But there’s a huge advantage for us: you don’t need to be a Google user, that is you don’t need to log in with an email address to use it. Additionally, it includes integrated services that allow us, on the same platform, not only to exchange files — a basic functionality — but also to conduct video conferences, like the one we’re holding right now. We can also use the calendar. I’m also pleased with user management: users, profiles and roles are easily managed and function well. This lets us leverage a protected, yet open, enterprise ecosystem—and it’s very comfortable. We also use Nextcloud Office, which is like having Microsoft Office 365 or Google Docs online, allowing multiple users to collaborate in real time. It’s very practical, honestly.
What’s your favorite feature of Nextcloud?
In our academy, we use search extensively and take full advantage of its flexible implementation in Nextcloud: we can search across all applications, within documents thanks to immediate indexing, by tags, in comments, and in chat messages. We also frequently use links for sharing files and folders—both external and internal. In short, as one begins to explore Nextcloud, they inevitably discover many very interesting features.
What services has RCA Systems provided you, and what do you value most about the services they’ve delivered so far?
Honestly, finding RCA Systems as an expert provider of the platform was truly relieving.
When I clearly understood the potential Nextcloud held to improve productivity and collaboration among teachers, I searched for providers across Spain. I found some who left me hanging and others who presented me with a kind of budget—but with nothing behind it, beyond making me pay for what I already had.
What I valued most—and still value—about RCA Systems is that there’s a genuine dialogue that truly seeks to understand how our organization operates and work, so they can offer us a precise and comprehensive solution to issues. That’s very important to us. And of course, we find also valuable that the service is reasonable, cost-wise.
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