Surf seeks test subjects to try out Microsoft alternative

Educational institutions would like to become less dependent on American big tech companies, especially Microsoft. That is not easy to do because more and more tasks are being performed by the company's tools.

However, according to ICT cooperative Surf, the "dominance of a handful of tech companies is putting our independence and public values under increasing pressure". To give European tech companies a chance, Surf is "investigating alternative applications, such as Nextcloud".

Tested
Nextcloud is a German software maker that provides applications that many people associate with Microsoft, such as word processing, email, document sharing and online meetings. This year, Surf tested this software with several dozen employees from five universities, who collaborated on a single research programme.

Educational institutions, university medical centres and research institutes have asked Surf if they could also start using Nextcloud, the ICT cooperative writes in a news item.

Volunteers
Surf is now recruiting volunteers, or rather teams of at least twenty volunteers, to determine whether this software facilitates effective collaboration. According to a spokesperson for Surf, the organisation hopes organisations large and small will participate, from secondary vocational education, higher professional education and university education.

Surf does not want to publicly disclose the costs of this initiative, "partly because it is a complex sum of pre-investments, existing infrastructure, distribution keys and one-off costs, to name but a few examples," notes the spokesperson. At the end of the day, Surf will pay three-quarters of the bill, with the rest being paid by the institutions themselves.

Around two thousand users will to try out the new software. Initially, the test will last for one year.