Building a sovereign collaboration platform with Nextcloud

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Michigan Tech Aerospace Enterprise’s mission is to provide hundreds of students the hands-on experience required to enter the aerospace industry, offering an environment to design, develop, and integrate systems on cube satellites. It provides opportunities for many majors, including, but not limited to, Aerospace, Mechanical, Electrical, and Software engineers, running the whole department.
As their projects expanded, the organization recognized the need for a unified, secure collaboration environment. With a large team working across complex aerospace projects, they needed a platform where they could plan, document and collaborate in an organized way, while retaining the flexibility to adapt the environment to their specific workflows.
Nextcloud presented the opportunity of an extensible, self-hosted alternative to their existing setup. 

Challenge: Fragmented tools and limited control

The team of around 100 students relied on Google Drive for collaboration, while enterprise members also used Microsoft tools locally on their machines. Moving documents between these environments meant repeatedly exporting and importing files, leading to formatting issues and unnecessary friction.The team considered deploying SharePoint on-premises, but realized before completing the deployment that it would not provide the flexibility and extensibility required for their workflows. Google Drive, while it proved useful for basic collaboration, was not customizable enough for the team’s increasingly complex needs.

At the same time, the group needed to meet strict requirements around where data is stored and how it is accessed. While the Aerospace Enterprise also has to comply with Federal Communications Commission regulations, its requirements for keeping data on premises are primarily related to security and export-control regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). A self-hosted collaboration environment gives the team greater control over where sensitive project data is stored and who can access it.

There were practical challenges too. Hosting virtual meetings, storing recordings, and organizing mission-specific resources across teams required additional tools and workarounds. Besides, documentation around setup and maintenance of existing platforms was not always sufficient, increasing the risk of misconfiguration and downtime.

Other challenges included:

• Inability to host individual websites for each Aerospace Enterprise mission, limiting access to mission-specific tools from a single interface
• Formatting inconsistencies in documents and presentations when switching between different office suites, especially between Microsoft Office and Google services
• Limited ability to update and maintain security features across subsystems over the long term
• Difficulty accessing and consulting documentation across the different tools used within the enterprise
• Lack of effective performance monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities in the event of system failures

Rethinking collaboration through sovereignty with Nextcloud

The team began looking for a solution that could bring their workflows together wile giving them full ownership of their data and infrastructure. They needed more than file storage: they wanted an extensible collaboration platform for planning projects, documenting their work and coordinating a large multidisciplinary team. It also needed to integrate with existing engineering tools and applications and run locally, giving the team control over its infrastructure and data.
As such, they chose Nextcloud and deployed it on-premise. The team is now building a centralized environment where files, communication, planning and documentation can come together in one platform. Nextcloud’s extensibility also allows them to adapt the environment to their own workflows rather than working within the limitations of a general-purpose file-sharing platform.

With Nextcloud, the department now uses a combination of apps including Nextcloud Files, Talk, Calendar, and Activity tracking, alongside integrations like Active Directory and office suite. These components work together within a system that is fully managed by the team and aligned with their operational requirements.

Preparing the next generation of engineers

By building their own collaboration environment, the Aerospace Enterprise is creating a platform that supports both its project work and its educational mission. Students gain hands-on experience in aerospace engineering, but also in managing secure, scalable, self-hosted systems.
This approach aligns their technical work with the industry expectations of data control, system integration, and operational reliability.
As their missions continue to evolve, the foundation they build with Nextcloud ensures that their collaboration environment can scale with their ambitions, remaining flexible, controlled, and, maybe most importantly, aligned with their values.