sciebo wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
With the end of the year comes plans and resolutions for the new year, as well as a look back at the past year!
The Move to Nextcloud
For us at the sciebo team, this was the main topic of the year, and we are generally satisfied with how smoothly it has gone. Unfortunately, there are still some points that do not work with Nextcloud as they did with ownCloud, and we are in constant contact with the manufacturer regarding these issues.
Usually, we try to document any issues with the corresponding functions in our Help section.
Shutdown of OnlyOffice at the End of February
For the upcoming funding period, sciebo will now use Collabora instead of OnlyOffice. This is ultimately due to the embargoes imposed against Russia because of the war of aggression against Ukraine.
With this step, sciebo is not the only institution in Europe. For example, SURF and SUNET offer a sciebo-like service in the Netherlands and Sweden, respectively, and they have also switched to Collabora. This way, we will have a large representation of users with similar needs at Collabora, so we can expect quick resolution of errors.
New Hardware Throughout the Year
The current generation of sciebo hardware is from the end of 2019 and is slowly reaching its limits. Therefore, there will be new hardware at sciebo in the first half of the year. It will take some time to integrate this into operations, and then it will mean: migrate, migrate, migrate!
Compared to the Nextcloud migration, we expect a significantly shorter downtime, as no extensive database conversions are required. We are still evaluating other ways to migrate databases, but we plan to start with the expectation that there will still be several hours of downtime for larger instances.
There will be more information on this when these moves are actually imminent.
Better Communication with Users
Lastly, the good resolutions!
It is no longer a viable strategy to rely solely on information from individual institutions and one or two social media channels. Some platforms are explicitly avoided by universities, and the remaining platforms are too many to manage.
Therefore, we want not only to communicate in a planned and consistent manner but also to explicitly state which information to expect on which communication channel.
Here is an overview of the available communication channels and what to expect on them:
Blog
Consequently, sciebo now also has a classic blog, namely this one. Here we go into more detail and background information. In the medium term, this page will also replace the current homepage, so that new posts are visible there.
Newsletter
Additionally, there is a newsletter that you can subscribe to here. Starting next year, we will periodically (planned quarterly) inform you about upcoming changes.
Incident Page
Incidents will continue to be reported on our Incident Page, which is also linked when we need to activate the maintenance elephant.
Login Page
If there are long-term restrictions or planned outages, we will also announce these additionally on the login page.
Todo: In the Web Interface and Client
The evaluation of further contact options in the web interface and client is still on our to-do list.