Federated ownCloud and Zaclys

Some time ago, in an attempt of degooglization, I moved my calendar and contacts management from Google to ownCloud.

My service provider is La mère Zaclys, a small french association.

Today, I attempted for the first time to make the file sharing part of the Zaclys ownCloud instance communicate with another instance – SwitchDrive, used by swiss academies – making use of the “Federated Cloud ID”.

The troubling part was to figure out that ID, as I couldn’t find any info in the Zacyls documentation. I noticed that the IDs are supposed to use this syntax:

user@cloud-url

When loggin into Zaclys, I have both a user name – e.g. “username” – and a numeric ID – e.g. “12345”.

So I made several attempts, none of which worked:

username@webcloud.zaclys.com
username@zaclys.com
12345@zaclys.com

Finally, I found the good ID format:

12345@webcloud.zaclys.com

Horray! It’s good to see that it’s so simple to make different ownCloud services communicate… once you got the guesswork right!