Office morning: n8n writes into Nextcloud

Try it first: the office morning. Press “Start the working day” and watch. A few seconds later a desk appears: day plan, Deck board, folder, team chat, the briefing and three receipts. The receipts show what n8n has just really created in Nextcloud.

What the workflow reads

Calendar: all appointments for today and tomorrow, via CalDAV. The server already expands recurring events. From this, n8n works out the free gaps in the day.
Deck: the board's cards with due dates. Overdue, due today, soon, later. Exactly the columns you want to see in the morning.
Files: the demo folder via WebDAV. What is new in the last 24 hours? A quote, an invoice, meeting notes.
Talk: the latest messages in the team chat. Who is waiting for an answer?

What the workflow writes

Deck card “Heute: Top 3”: the three priorities as a checklist, in the “Today” column. You tick them off where you work anyway.
Briefing as a Markdown file: Briefing-date.md in the Briefings folder. Priorities, buffer, what to delegate, what to answer in the chat first, a tip.
Focus time in the calendar: an event in the first free gap. That way the team also sees that now is not the best moment for a call.

That is the real point: the briefing does not get stuck in a chat window. It lands in the tools the office opens every day anyway. For a small office, that is often enough as a morning routine.

Privacy: only a demo area

The workflow runs against my Nextcloud server, but only in sealed-off demo spaces called “n8n-Demo”: its own calendar, its own Deck board, its own folder, its own Talk room. They only hold fake data of the fictional “Musterbüro GmbH”, with made-up colleagues. Nobody sees real appointments, files or messages here.

A Code node fixes every allowed address. Each URL is checked against it before a request goes out. If one points anywhere else, the run stops.
From the answers, n8n keeps only a fixed list of fields: titles, times, file names. No owners, no user IDs.
The page sends nothing about you to Nextcloud. For the hourly limit, the server keeps a salted hash of the IP address for one hour at most.

How the workflow is built

Webhook: your click starts the workflow. Before that, the server checks the pause between two mornings and the limits per hour and per day.
Set the demo area: a Code node sets the calendar, board, folder and Talk room. Everything else is off limits.
Six requests at once: CalDAV REPORT for the appointments, a PROPFIND for the calendar entries, the Deck API, two WebDAV PROPFIND for the folder and the briefings, the Talk API. A Merge node collects it all.
Assess the office: a Code node sorts the cards by due date, finds new files and the first free hour for the focus block.
AI assistant: gpt-oss-120b at IONOS in Germany. It only gets these facts and must not invent anything. It answers as JSON: three priorities, buffer, delegate, chat, tip. If it does not answer, n8n builds the briefing itself from a template.
Three write nodes: the Deck API for the card, WebDAV PUT for the file, CalDAV PUT for the focus time.
Automatic cleanup: so nothing piles up, the workflow deletes older cards, briefings and focus blocks it created itself. At most the last 5 stay. Then it refreshes the demo data so the due dates match today.

Build it yourself

The workflow is ready as JSON to import. Secrets are removed, placeholders are marked: the address of your Nextcloud, the user, the Talk room, the webhook path and the page that receives the result. You also need two credentials in n8n: an app password for Nextcloud (Basic Auth) and a key for an OpenAI-compatible AI.

My advice: start exactly like this. Create a separate calendar, board and folder in Nextcloud and let the workflow work only there. Once that runs well for a few days, switch the addresses to your real spaces. Then replace the webhook with a schedule, for example weekdays at 7:45.

What comes next

The office morning is the opener: from 1 December, the series “n8n × Nextcloud” starts, with workflows that really take work off your hands in a Nextcloud office. It will appear in the n8n overview, where you also find all the other workflows to click and download.