Personally, I think yes, it is worth it, However your friends bookkeeper might shit a brick. Building up IT infrastructure from the ground up is not cheap. Although storage cost is coming down.

Seriously, running with Google and company will be cheaper in the short term. What you can potentially gain doing it yourself however is resilience from catastrophic 3rd party events. If your not dependent on a third party for your IT infra, it doesn’t matter what they do, or don’t do. For a recent example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/influxdata-apologizes-for-deleting-cloud-regions-without-performing-scream-test/ar-AA1dIPX2

I’m managing one for about 250 users. It’s been pretty reliable, but do prepare for some amount of trouble once in a while, including work on the database if things go really south. Nothing too difficult though if you understand SQL and web backends well enough.

It’s best to keep the installation clean and not install too many apps for the sake of performance.

So overall I’d say it’s worth it, yes.

For an enterprise I would suggest working with a nextcloud partner. Unless they have a sizeable internal IT team of course.

We use nextcloud where I work, it is a smaller company (less than 100 people) but it works just fine.

Yes, with some big "if"s. NextCloud can work very well for a large organization if that large organization has a “real” IT department. I use “real” to describe how IT departments used to work 20+ years ago, where someone from IT was expected to be on call 24/7, they built and configured their own software, did daily checks and maintenance, etc. Those sorts of IT departments are rare these days. But if they have the right personnel, it can definitely be done. NextCloud can be set up with hot failovers and fancy stuff like that if you know what you’re doing.

I think the key question is to ask what about Googles solution is driving them to look elsewhere. Once that’s known it’s possible to work out if NextCloud deployed in house or via a partner is the right way forward, or if another cloud offering might be more suitable.

My biggest issue with Nextcloud is there is no LTS version. Employees do NOT like things constantly changing, and Nextcloud has some pretty major changes every 4-6 months. As an admin you really have to keep up to date, or you run into trouble, not just with security, but with trying to upgrade later, as you can’t upgrade across major versions.

In my opinion, a 2-3 year supported LTS version would make Nextcloud way more attractive to hosting in stable environments.

Yeah, for enterprise you aren’t going to roll it out yourself. They’d use a partner company to help you set it up and configure it for their needs to ensure that it can continue to scale and provide monitoring solutions. It’s too much for one person to do that.

Where are you hosting it? Onsite? Megacorporation’s clod solution? Your cable line? What’s your data recovery plan? 200+ users can generate a lot of data. What’s the security plan? You do know how to harden every aspect of each subsystem, right? What’s the monitoring plan? Not just “is it down” but way more granular for each subsystem. How many tech and phone support people will be on call to help?

You could probably roll it out in a way that would work, but at that scale you should really be using a pro. Especially for a “friend”. Don’t want a tech problem to kill that friendship.