19.07.2017, Tirana.
The municipality of Tirana, the biggest municipality in the country serving over 800,000 citizens, decided to make an important move onto open source technologies, by implementing yet another open source software in its infrastructure and offering a major improvement with the deployment of a private cloud service: cloud.tirana.al.
Photo by Leeturtle CC BY-SA 3.0
On 11th of June the Municipality of Tirana migrated from ownCloud to Nextcloud after two months of usage. This replacement was proposed by the IT staff after taking into consideration the priorities that the latter has in terms of security and performance, and the fact that Nextcloud is offering an enterprise product which is 100% open source as well as their community support that might be a valuable asset in the future.
The director of the IT department of the municipality, Mr. Ermir Puka and his team where very optimistic for the private cloud service project since they first thought of offering such a solution and that they see Nextcloud as the best choice among similar products they considered, to address the needs of more than 600 employees of the municipality for secure file sharing and different applications like the Collabora Online tools, the Calendar, the Chat app, the mobile client(s) and more apps of the Nextcloud ecosystem.
The migration to Nextcloud is an important event since this is the first municipality in South Eastern Europe which is putting serious efforts in avoiding proprietary software, as a way to cut off costs and protect the privacy of its data, employees and citizens and it has chosen also Nextcloud among other open source software they are currently using, as a tool to accomplish this.
An important contributor in raising the public awareness on the importance of free open source culture in general and the public administration embracing it in particular, has been the local community of the Open Labs Hackerspace. Different events organized, like meetups, localization sprints, workshops and bigger ones like the Open Source Conference Albania (OSCAL) have provided opportunities for people to get in touch with technologies and solutions that are more focused in the freedom of their users. In addition, the growth of the local community is great news for everybody, as it is expected to positively influence the municipality IT department as well as other local government and private organizations in the upcoming months, providing skills and knowledge as well as a potential opportunities to hire from.
About Nextcloud: Nextcloud is an open source file sync & share platform which was started by ownCloud founder Frank Karlitschek and members of the team. Nextcloud aims to empower users to take back control over their data and communication as an alternative to Dropbox or Google apps, which can be installed on a personal server– allowing users to sync & share files, calendars, contacts and more!
City/Location: Tirana
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