SURF is looking for guinea pigs: take part in an alternative to Microsoft

Wanted: around two thousand lecturers, researchers and other staff who want to try out Nextcloud, a serious European alternative to Microsoft.

Educational institutions would like to become less dependent on American big tech, and especially on Microsoft. That is not easy, because the company is taking more and more tasks on itself and taking a lot of work off people’s hands.

But, says IT cooperative SURF, the ‘dominance of a few major tech companies is putting our independence and public values under increasing pressure’. To give European alternatives a chance, ‘we are looking into alternative applications, such as Nextcloud’.

Tested

Nextcloud is a German software developer and provides applications that many people will immediately associate with Microsoft: word processing, email, document sharing and online meetings. This year, SURF tested this software, including with several dozen staff from five universities who worked together in one research programme.

All sorts of educational institutions, but also university medical centres and research institutes, have asked SURF whether they too can start working with Nextcloud, SURF writes in a news item.

Volunteers

So SURF is now recruiting volunteers, or rather: teams of at least twenty volunteers. Because SURF wants to know, among other things, whether collaboration between users goes well with this software. The organisation hopes that many different organisations will take part, the spokesperson says. Large and small, from senior secondary vocational education, universities of applied sciences and research universities.

SURF does not want to say publicly what it costs, ‘also because it is a complex sum of, for example, initial investments, existing infrastructure, distribution keys and one-off costs’, according to the spokesperson. But when all is said and done, SURF pays three quarters of the bill, the rest is for the institutions themselves.

Around two thousand users can try out the new software. Initially, the test will run for a year.