Sorbonne University implements on-premise solution with Nextcloud

Sorbonne University, or La Sorbonne, is a a renowned university in Paris, France first established in 1257. Over more than a 750 year period, names like Marie Curie, François Mitterrand and Vera Wang were all pupils at the institution making history in science, politics and fashion. In 2018, Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV) and Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris VI), both constituents of the University of Paris, were merged together under one name: Sorbonne.

Today, Sorbonne University boasts 55,000 students including 6,700 researchers and a staff of 15,000. As part of their digitization master plan, they wanted to set up and provide its users with personal cloud storage based on open-source products hosted on its own infrastructures. This project was dubbed ‘DropSU.’

DropSU

DropSU is Sorbonne University’s official cloud solution. It is hosted on the university’s servers so it is GDPR compliant and has restricted access to data which is ideal for researchers working on confidential files.

The main use is for university administrators who use it for storing, sharing and collaborating on documents individually or on a team. They have the ability to use it from anywhere, without having to connect to a VPN or internal network.

Since much of the administrators work is done with people outside the university, documents can be easily accessed by external users through secure file sharing. All the administrator has to do is send a file link in an email that either gives read, edit or download rights to the recipient.

All in all, users picked up DropSU quite easily as the tool is intuitive and puts you in control fast. The staff is now accustomed to the system and collaborative work is done seamlessly everyday.

Mission accomplished

With DropSU, the university was able to achieve a sovereign cloud solution for its staff and researchers. Maintaining control over their data and user accounts was an important objective for them and can now be managed by their internal IT team alongside Nextcloud.

Sorbonne University set up the technical architecture with Nextcloud Gold Partner Arawa. Arawa also assists the University with the maintenance and support of Nextcloud Hub.

Read the full case study

To learn more about this educational use case including a detailed look into their implementation of Nextcloud, their infrastructure and plans for the future, please consult the case study which you can download now.