Core concepts

nexxus has a small vocabulary. Once you know what a tenant is, how the two kinds of roles differ and what the AI Assistant may and may not do, the rest of the documentation reads like a set of variations on the same few ideas. This page introduces them in the order you will meet them.

People

• AdministratorsSet up the tenant, AI, connectors and access
• Your teamWorks in the modules, with the AI Assistant beside them
• Builders and developersAdd apps, connectors and NXM modules

Your tenant

One separate data area with its own settings, people, roles and AI configuration

• Areas
• Modules
• Files
• Roles
• AI Assistant

Extensions

• ConnectorsGive the AI Assistant tools and connections
• AppsSmall tools stored as files
• NXM modulesFull business modules as packages

Everything in nexxus belongs to a tenant. People work in it, and three kinds of extensions add to it.

Installation and tenant

An installation is one running nexxus: one backend, one database, one web address. Inside it live one or more tenants (Mandanten in German). A tenant is a separate data area. Every record carries the tenant it belongs to, and nexxus takes that tenant from the person who is signed in, so a request can never reach into another tenant’s data.

Most companies have exactly one tenant. It is created when nexxus starts for the first time and gets its name from the organisation name you enter in the setup wizard. The tenant also holds the settings that make nexxus yours: the name shown in the app, logo and colours, language and time zone, the assistant’s name, which business areas are switched on, the mail server and the AI configuration.

Areas and modules

The navigation rail on the left groups everything into six areas:

Area	What you find there
Start	The dashboard and the apps
Organisation	The daily work: time, absence, customers, projects and billing
ISMS	Information security under Art. 32 GDPR: assets, risks, measures, declarations
Documents	Files: store, share and version them
AI	Your sessions with the AI Assistant, knowledge, skills, schedules, and the AI setup
Administration	Users and access, company and tenant, content and operations

That is the order nexxus comes with. An administrator can change it for the whole tenant in the setup step Main menu: reorder, rename and add areas, move pages, and bring a page the team needs every day into the rail as its own icon. One click on it opens the page directly. The order grants no rights; everyone still sees only what they may open.

Each area is made of modules: companies, contacts, projects, timesheets, absences, forms and more. nexxus ships these built-in modules with the product. Administrators can switch whole business areas off in the setup wizard when the company does not use them, and their entries disappear from the menu.

People and roles

Every person who signs in has an account, and an account usually belongs to a person record and a company. What that person may do is decided by two layers of roles that work side by side:

• System roles are coarse. The one that matters day to day is Administrator. Administrators pass every permission check: they invite people, hand out roles, see the logs and change the system configuration.
• Access roles (Berechtigungsrollen) are fine-grained. An access role is a set of permission keys per module, such as reading projects, editing timesheets or using the assistant. You assign access roles to people for the whole tenant or for a single business unit.

nexxus has no fixed access roles. In the setup wizard the AI Assistant proposes the first ones from your description, or you apply templates that fit the areas you switched on. From then on you shape them yourself.

The rule that ties it all together: a person sees only the pages and records their roles allow, and so does the AI Assistant when it works for them.

The AI Assistant

The AI Assistant sits in a column on the right of every page. You can rename it for your company. It knows which page you are on and which record you have open, so “summarise this customer’s open projects” needs no further explanation. It can look at part of your screen when you show it, search your files and knowledge, and use the connectors your admin has installed.

The AI Assistant works with your rights. Every tool it calls runs on the server as you. When it wants to change something, it does not write anything itself. It prepares an action and shows it to you as a card.

1. You ask on any page

   The AI Assistant gets the page and the record you are looking at as context.

2. The AI Assistant gathers

   It reads data and files through tools that run with your rights.

3. The AI Assistant proposes

   A change arrives as an action card. The server checks input, state and permission.

4. You confirm

   Only then does the change run, again with every check, and land in the audit log.

Answers come with their sources. Changes always need a person's click.

Your conversations are kept as sessions. Under the AI area you also find knowledge (facts and policies the AI Assistant should always know), skills (written instructions for recurring tasks such as turning a transcript into minutes) and schedules (tasks the AI Assistant runs on a timetable).

AI providers and models

nexxus does not run a language model itself. An administrator connects one or more AI providers for the tenant, such as IONOS, Scaleway, OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, or a model on your own server through any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. From each provider you choose which models are active and which ones people may pick in the chat, and you enter their prices. Separately, you choose one model each for embeddings, speech input and reading answers aloud.

All AI traffic runs through the nexxus AI gateway, which fetches the tenant’s provider settings and calls back into nexxus for every tool. That is how a tool call ends up running with the rights of the person who asked.

Connectors

A connector is something the AI Assistant can use. There are three kinds:

• Tools are built-in capabilities, such as creating a Word document or a chart.
• Integrations connect another system, such as Outlook, Jira, HubSpot or Personio.
• Skills are written instructions for a kind of task.

Administrators decide which connectors the company has. Each person decides which ones are switched on in a conversation and connects their own accounts where a connector needs a login. The AI Assistant only ever acts with the rights of the account that is connected.

Files

Under DocumentsFiles nexxus keeps your documents. You organise them in folders or by attributes, depending on how your company works, and you share them with people, roles or through a public link. Files keep their versions. With embeddings switched on, the AI Assistant searches the content of your documents by meaning and cites the passages it used.

Apps

An app is a small, self-contained tool that lives in your files, such as a Kanban board or a Markdown editor. Each document you create with it is a file of its own, so it has a folder, rights and versions like any other file. It opens in a sandbox inside nexxus, several people can edit it at the same time, and the AI Assistant can edit it with you. New apps arrive as .nxa packages that you import into your tenant.

NXM modules

An NXM module is a full business module delivered as a package file (.nxm). It brings its own records, views, roles and actions, and optionally its own service, and it runs on the same core as the built-in modules: rights, tenants, audit log and the AI Assistant come with it. Administrators upload and install packages under AdministrationOperationsModules on the tab Packages.

Which extension fits?

All three ways to extend nexxus stay inside your tenant. They differ in who builds them and how big the thing is.

	Connector	App	NXM module
What it is	A tool, connection or instruction set for the AI Assistant	A small tool whose documents are files	A business module with records, views and roles
Who builds it	Admins connect it; anyone with the right can add an MCP connector or REST actions	Business teams, together with the AI Assistant, no code	Developers
Where it lives	In the AI Assistant’s connector menu	In your files, opened from Start	In the menu, like a built-in module
Example	Read and send Outlook mail	A Kanban board for the onboarding of new staff	A loan register for company devices

Next steps

QuickstartSet up nexxus and get a first answer from the AI Assistant.

Find your way aroundEvery area and entry in the navigation.