The Ille-et-Vilaine department in France deployed an open source software for file management to 21 middle schools, accounting for 12,000 users between teachers and students.
In December 2021, the French public interest group SIB (Syndicat Interhospitalier de Bretagne) kicked off a project with the German open source company Nextcloud GmbH and the British company Collabora Productivity with a view to improve the education system in the Ille-et-Vilaine department in France. Based in Rennes, SIB is a group for public interest which provides digital services as core business, managing the deployment of information systems for healthcare and public sector in general.
In this case, the project relates to education, whose scope includes the provision of a new file system to middle-school teachers and students. The first stage of the deployment phase entails 21 middle schools including around 12,000 users (teachers and students). However, the goal is to scale it up to 57 middle schools with 35,500 users (divided in 2,500 teachers and 33,000 students).
Source: Homepage of the Ille-et-Vilaine public school system cloud solution.
This solution, which has been firstly used internally by SIB and only then deployed to the schools, is fully open source and provides several functionalities: multi-devices compatibility, remote access for the online distance teaching, advanced collaboration features on documents and integration with Collabora Online (thus allowing for interoperability), advanced group sharing features (group folders, ACLs).
The infrastructure is hosted in SIB data centres, in Brittany, and can scale according to the middle school’s needs to include a large and growing number of users. In this, SIB manages all elements of the system, from the open source configuration to other elements such as hardware and middle-ware - while directly managing the supervision, support and maintenance phases of the project.