SURF, the national ICT organisation for education and research, announced the pilot with the platform Nextcloud last November. The goal is to reduce dependence on American ‘big tech’ companies such as Microsoft, driven by geopolitical developments.
A European alternative
UT, like other universities, is participating in the year-long pilot. Each institution needs at least twenty participants. According to UT, the added value of Nextcloud lies mainly in collaborative work. Participation is particularly relevant ‘if you work in a research group, project team, department or unit’, ‘develop or manage documents together’, and ‘need a shared digital workspace’, according to the service portal message.
Calls to move away from big tech have grown louder in recent months, including from UT professorsv and the University Council. UT currently relies heavily on hardware and software from the American company Microsoft. Nextcloud is a small European company offering open-source software. Whether it can truly replace the current suite remains to be seen.
Scaling up?
In an earlier interview with U-Today, LISA director Mert Alberts spoke about the opportunities that Nextcloud offers, but also issued a word of caution: whether the software can match Microsoft’s environment in terms of performance and functionality is uncertain. He also mentioned scaling up as a major challenge: ‘How do we ensure we have something that works for a large organisation with more than fifteen thousand devices?’
