Münster University
Location: Germany
How ONLYOFFICE and ownCloud integration in sciebo helps facilitate research workflow in Münster University
Profile
Münster University and sciebo
With more than 40,000 students and 5,000 employees, Münster University is Germany’s 3rd biggest university. It offers a wide variety of subjects and maintains a diversified research profile.
The university’s IT center (Zentrum für Informationsverarbeitung, ZIV) offers a sync & share service called sciebo (short for “science box”) – not just for Münster University, but for almost all universities and a research center in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous federal state in Germany. Currently, more than 100,000 users are registered for sciebo.
Challenges
Organizing sciebo was a complex task because the service has to scale for user numbers much larger than the usual one. Legal challenges have to be mastered as well and, in this context, end user contracts, according to GDPR, had to be created. Even more important is that the service has to be tailored to users needs. Holger Angenent, sciebo project leader from Münster University’s IT center: “We match this target quite well according to our surveys, where the users attest us an even better quality than of the big names in cloud business”.
Amongst sciebo users, there are also researchers who deal with sensitive and often confidential data, and therefore have very high demands on data protection and protection against data loss.
Achievements
ONLYOFFICE and ownCloud are already successfully in use at numerous universities and organizations. Internal testing demonstrated that both solutions were ideally suited to sciebo application scenario, and were superior to other solutions. It was also very important that both are Open Source products that serve a great demand of sciebo users and have a scalable robust architecture.
Holger Angenent: “Hopefully, the ownCloud-ONLYOFFICE combination has simplified the exchange of data and fostered more collaborative work per se. To reveal concrete changes in the everyday working lives of our employees, we will have to conduct further studies.”
Read the full success story