Offline collaboration for your whole office — no internet, no cloud

We've written before about noteloom's peer-to-peer collaboration — two people, direct WebRTC connection, no server storing the document. The natural next question: what if it's not two people, but an entire office? Everyone on the same WiFi, collaborating on shared documents, permanently, with the building's internet connection completely irrelevant to whether it works. That's not a hypothetical — it's a straightforward setup, and this post is the whole thing, end to end.

The problem with "just use a cloud tool" for internal teams

Cloud collaboration tools are fine for most things, but they come with a quiet assumption: your internet has to be up, your documents live on someone else's infrastructure indefinitely, and there's usually a per-seat subscription attached. For an internal tool — meeting notes, a shared runbook, an ops checklist a whole team edits during an incident — none of that is actually necessary. The only real requirement is that everyone in the building can reach each other, which a WiFi router already does on its own.

What you actually need: one small always-on box

The whole setup is four steps, and none of them need real hardware — an old PC nobody uses, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, whatever's sitting around and stays powered on:

1. Run a small signaling relay (a ~100-line Node script) on that always-on machine.
2. Give it a fixed local IP — a DHCP reservation in your router's admin page, so the address never changes.
3. Run it under a process manager (pm2, systemd, a Windows service) so it survives reboots instead of dying when a terminal closes.
4. Point the app's WebSocket signaling config at that fixed address, and serve the app itself from somewhere on the same LAN.

The relay side, concretely (using pm2, cross-platform):

npm install -g pm2
pm2 start server.js --name office-relay
pm2 save
pm2 startup   # sets up auto-start on boot

The one gotcha that catches everyone

Most office routers put a "guest" WiFi network on a separate VLAN that deliberately can't reach the main network — that's a real security feature, not a bug, but it means anyone on guest WiFi will never find the relay even though their device says "connected." If this doesn't work for someone, check which network they're actually on before assuming the relay is broken.

What this actually buys you

Side by side with a typical cloud tool:

Read the full guide

This post is the overview — the complete step-by-step (exact commands, router-specific notes on DHCP reservations, updating it later) is written up in full in the docs. Or just try the underlying collaboration itself first, no setup required.