OX App Suite

The latest offer from Open Xchange, the OX App Suite is a multi-function platform, focusing on easy-to-use apps that encourage productivity and collaboration. The OX App Suite provides users with numerous productivity apps to help them stay focused and make the most of their time. The platform is considered a good Office 365 or G Suite alternative, standing out in particular thanks to its collaboration capabilities. The OX App Suite is cloud-based, making access easy no matter where you are.

Open-Xchange AG, a company of over 270 employees (as of July 2019), develops e-mail and productivity software. The company was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Cologne. Open-Xchange solutions are distributed through over 100 internet service providers as well as hosting, telecommunications and cable providers, which make them available to their customers as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). More than 200 million users already use Open-Xchange's open source software for their private and business communications. The United Internet Group, to which 1&1 IONOS also belongs, has had a stake in Open-Xchange AG since 2013.

The OX App Suite offers a wide range of modular services to help streamline your business processes. The range of apps focuses on increasing all areas of productivity, in addition to applications for spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing. Documents can also be stored online, and email traffic can be merged. Customers can select which apps are the most suitable for them and bundle them appropriately. Available apps include: OX Mail, OX Calendar, OX Contacts, OX Portal, OX Tasks, OX Drive, OX Text, OX Spreadsheets, OX Presentation and OX Presenter.

OX Mail can sync with your existing email accounts to provide you with an all-in-one email solution. Folders and tabs are easy to create, and there are sorting, searching and flagging functions to help you organise your emails. OX Mail is available as a mobile app for iOS and Android. The perfect complement is OX Calendar, which allows you to create private and public calendars (with permission control) that are easily shareable, and also features a handy meeting-scheduler so that you can arrange team meetings easily. OX Calendar has built in time-zone integration and visualization, and also permits scheduling on behalf of others.

OX Contacts provides a centralised database for your contacts, and can be synchronised with other devices and native lists. You will also have easy access to mailing lists and appointments directly from the contacts app. OX Portal is the OX App Suite's dashboard, which can easily be personalised by the individual user thanks to its widget-based setup. The portal is easy to configure and extend, while the customer can create their own specific functions, as well as having an overview of their email inbox, appointments, different tasks and files. OX Tasks is an app in the OX App Suite that helps you manage your time effectively. OX Tasks helps with scheduling and task creation (both single and multi-user), it allows you to delegate your tasks to others, create to-do lists and provides a clear overview of how your tasks are progressing.

Since the OX App Suite prioritises productivity and easy collaboration, you can easily import and edit files from other productivity solutions and programs using the OX App Suite. OX Documents fully supports editing and reading .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files, among others. What's more, if a document contains an unrecognised element, then OX Documents creates a placeholder, so that once you have finished editing, you can open your document in the original editor and the original format will be intact, with your new changes visible alongside the original content and formatting.

The OX App Suite is available through 1&1 IONOS as a SaaS cloud-based service. Setting up an account is easily done through the 1&1 IONOS control panel. Here you will be asked to input basic information, and select a password. Once you have set up your account, you will be able to download apps manually or using a wizard from the dashboard. Apps can be installed manually on iOS or Android. To download apps manually, simply go to Google or Apple's app store and download your chosen apps directly.

You can set up your OX Mail app to sync with your existing email accounts. To add email accounts to your OX Mail overview, simply click on Add mail account when you are in the folder view, this will open a window. Click on one of the icons and a new browser window will open. Simply provide your credentials and grant permission for data access (if prompted) to provide access to the email account. If the window doesn't appear, you can manually input the information by clicking Manually. You will then be able to see your email account in the folder view, should you wish to view them in the Unified mail folder, simply select Use unified mail for this account.

Yes. The OX App Suite is fully compatible with the GDPR security regulations; all the data is hosted on servers located in Germany and is in complete compliance with European data protection laws.

The OX App Suite holds its own among competitors and is considered a good alternative to G Suite and Microsoft Office 365. A hot topic issue at the moment is online security, and the Open Xchange App Suite excels at this. Thanks to their European provider, which hosts the program from Germany, you can be assured that your data is being held to the utmost security standards, complying with both the GDPR and Germany's own high standard of data security legislation.

The OX App Suite's goal is to provide users with the essentials they need for their daily lives, rather than weighing users down with a multitude of unnecessary options. The OX App Suite has a high level of functionality, while still being a simple, streamlined tool to use. The OX App Suite is easy to integrate with other email accounts, allowing external accounts to be displayed in OX interface folders. As well as this, the email inbox has numerous advanced features missing in other office solutions: Users can mark, move and convert emails into meetings requests and much more.

The OX App Suite also shines when it comes to working with documents. Users can use OX Documents to read and edit documents from Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and the documents will not be destroyed or have their formatting changed when saving. OX Documents also allows users to easily save documents in the OX Drive, download them or send them by email, as well as print directly from the web browser. An additional benefit of the OX App Suite: users can share documents online with others, even if they do not have OX. Anyone is able to receive documents, view them and even edit them if editing rights are provided by the sender – this gives OX Documents full collaboration functionality, something missing from many competitors' offers.

Do you have a big presentation coming up at work, university or even a party? OX Drive allows you to produce a presentation over the internet without requiring any additional software, saving you time and worry.

Overall, there are many areas where the OX App Suite stands out in terms of functionality and collaboration capabilities, and the final major benefit is the low-pricing options available. The Open Xchange App Suite should be seriously considered by anyone thinking of migrating to Office 365 or G Suite.

All files can be uploaded to the online store and shared with others. The "Basic" package has a total storage capacity of 50 GB per user account.