Teaching teams
Prepare shared course material and coordinate revisions with colleagues. Decide what belongs in the teaching workspace and what students receive through the learning platform.
NEXTCLOUD FOR EDUCATION & RESEARCH
Collaboration that belongs to your institution.
Bring staff, students and research partners together while retaining control over institutional data.
Education & ResearchFiles · Office · Talk
Who uses the workspace
Give teaching and research a workspace with clear ownership.
Teaching material, institutional documents and research outputs often have different audiences and lifecycles. Set up the workspace around those differences before inviting students, staff and external collaborators.
Research groups
Organize proposals, protocols, meeting notes and working papers around the project. Classify data before sharing and agree where restricted raw material belongs.
External collaborators
Give a visiting researcher or partner institution access to the agreed material. Review access at a milestone and assign an institutional owner before the collaboration ends.
Institutional IT
Map staff, student and research groups to the identity system. Test onboarding and departures, including what happens to shared files when an account expires.
A practical workflow
Support the work from teaching prep to research handover.
Prepare a course together
Keep source material and review copies in a staff workspace. Once material is ready, publish the approved copy through the designated course channel.
Start a multi-institution project
Agree which files collaborators can access and who can invite participants. Use separate locations for shareable material and datasets that require a restricted environment.
Draft a grant or publication
Co-edit supported documents and keep reviewer comments, source material and action items together. Agree who can release the submission or publication copy.
Close out a research workspace
Review member access, transfer ownership and export agreed outputs. Identify which records must move to an institutional repository or archive.
Nextcloud in practice
Tools for teaching teams and research groups.
Official Nextcloud screens with demonstration content.
Nextcloud Files
Share agreed course material or research working files with the right group.
Official product page ↗
Nextcloud Office
Co-edit supported grant drafts, meeting records and project reports.
Official product page ↗
Nextcloud Talk
Coordinate reviews and meetings with colleagues and invited research partners.
Official product page ↗Security & Data Protection
Open collaboration. Protected knowledge.
Teaching and research need different sharing boundaries. Separate public materials from student records, unpublished results and restricted research datasets.
Nextcloud HubInstitutional identity
Separate staff, students and external research partners.
Sensitive datasets
Limit access and agree encryption needs.
Accountability
Configure logging for restricted workspaces.
Research continuity
Agree dataset ownership, retention and recovery.
In a research project
Share approved material across institutions.
Set up a project workspace for the research team and invited collaborators. Keep restricted raw data within the agreed research environment, and share approved working material in the project workspace. Review membership at milestones and assign ownership when the project ends.
Applicable requirements
Set the rules for your deployment.
- Privacy: ZZPL & GDPR. Student records and identifiable research data require careful access and retention decisions. Assess additional safeguards for children or sensitive data, and the roles of external research partners. Serbia’s ZZPL and the EU GDPR have separate scopes. Serbian ZZPL ↗ · EU GDPR ↗
- Research & cybersecurity. NIS2’s definition of a research organisation excludes educational institutions. National rules may extend coverage. Check the specific institution and assess Serbian cybersecurity obligations separately. NIS2: scope and definitions ↗
- Research records & retention. Set retention using applicable law, institutional schedules and grant agreements. Plan formal preservation where required; synchronization and version history do not replace an archival or research-data management process. State Archives: law ↗
Nextcloud security ↗ · Nextcloud compliance ↗ · Serbian Information Security Law (91/2025) ↗ · NIS2 scope ↗
YOUR PLATFORM. YOUR OPERATING MODEL.
Enterprise foundations.
Managed to your needs.
Choose who operates the platform. We define the deployment, responsibilities and support scope with you before implementation.
Nextcloud Enterprise
For organizations that want to run Nextcloud on their own or agreed private infrastructure.
- Architecture and Enterprise subscription planning
- Identity, storage and security integration
- Migration, configuration and administrator handover
- Support aligned with the selected subscription
Managed Nextcloud
For teams that want a defined operational service alongside their collaboration platform.
- Hosting location and access boundaries agreed with you
- Monitoring, maintenance and update responsibilities
- Backup and recovery scope with restoration checks
- User support, capacity reviews and service reporting
Proposed service scope. Hosting, subscription, response times, recovery objectives and pricing are confirmed in the written offer. Managed service is an operating model; it can include Nextcloud Enterprise.
QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU START
Clear expectations from day one.
Can we use our existing institutional accounts?
Bring your identity system and the groups you already manage, such as staff, students and researchers. We assess the available integration and agree which groups get access to each type of workspace.
Test sign-in, group changes and account removal with representative users before rollout. Include what happens to shared project files when a student graduates or a researcher leaves.
Can external researchers join a project?
Plan access around the individual project. For example, a collaborator at another university could use a named account for shared working material, with access reviewed at a milestone or when the collaboration ends.
Agree who approves external access, which datasets can be shared and who owns the workspace after the project closes. Test those decisions with a small working group first.
How should we handle sensitive or very large research data?
Classify the data before migration and agree which material is eligible for collaboration. Capture any funder, ethics or data-sharing restrictions and estimate storage, transfer and recovery needs.
Use representative file sizes in the pilot. Define where raw data stays, what can be shared with the team and which outputs belong in an institutional repository or archive.
Where will our data be hosted?
Choose between infrastructure you operate and a hosting environment agreed during solution design. Before deployment, we document where primary files and backups reside, who can administer each system and how data is exported or restored.
If your procurement or contracts specify a country, a provider or limits on remote support access, bring those requirements to the design review. We confirm them against the proposed deployment and service terms.
Start with one workflow
Plan the pilot before you scale.
Discover
Pick one course preparation group or research consortium and identify its data classes.
Pilot
Test institutional sign-in, an external collaborator, representative file sizes and account removal.
Roll out
Document ownership, support and the transfer of records before inviting more groups.
5 published references
CASE STUDIES & CUSTOMER STORIES
Case studies
Explore real deployments and the workflows behind them. Each example links to its original publisher.
France · Higher education
Sorbonne University
DropSU provides on-premises file sharing and document collaboration, integrated with institutional directory and authentication services. The published case distinguishes staff adoption from planned expansion to students.
Official case study · Published by Nextcloud · Partner: ArawaRead the Nextcloud story ↗Spain · Research
CSIC
Spain’s public research organization uses an on-premises collaboration platform connected to high-performance storage. The case focuses on large research datasets and institutional control across a distributed scientific community.
Official case study · Published by NextcloudRead the Nextcloud story ↗Luxembourg · Schools
Luxembourg education — CGIE
The education ministry’s IT organization deployed Nextcloud to protect teacher and student data. The case describes the platform choice, implementation and support for education-sector collaboration.
Official case study · Published by Nextcloud · Partner: HKNRead the Nextcloud story ↗Germany · Academic collaboration
University of Münster / Sciebo
A university-led cloud service illustrates collaboration across academic institutions. The on-demand session covers the transition to Nextcloud, architecture, migration and integrations such as Overleaf.
Customer webinar · Published by NextcloudExplore the customer webinar ↗USA · Engineering education
Michigan Tech Aerospace Enterprise
A student aerospace team brought engineering files, communication and planning into a self-hosted workspace. This is an engineering-education deployment, rather than a construction contractor or factory reference.
Related engineering example · Published by NextcloudRead the Nextcloud story ↗These are external Nextcloud customer references or stories published by the named implementation providers. They are not presented as NATIVITY implementations. Related engineering examples are labelled separately; individual outcomes depend on the deployment.
