In an article published on its website on 27 May, the CNIL calls for an evolution in the use of American collaborative tools for higher education and research. For several months now, Télécom Saint-Etienne has been rethinking its information system (IS) towards the integration of free software and continues its evolution towards an Opensource IS oriented towards GreenIT and respectful of its users’ data”
Opensource software allows us to control what happens in the applications because the source code is available. We therefore know exactly what is done with the data and how it is handled (it is not passed on to a third party or an editor, for example). In most cases, we can host these applications ourselves, guaranteeing us total control over the data we store.
All our virtualisation infrastructure, our supervision and metrology tools (performance and availability measurement) are based on open source solutions, thus forming an open and coherent software base.
This phase of evolution on the infrastructure part of the IS continues the approach initiated by the school’s management with functional tools that have been re-internalised to guarantee data sovereignty such as the cloud (NextCloud / OnlyOffice), the source code manager (GitLab), internet chat (Mattermost) or task management (Wekan), etc… This approach allows us to respond to the needs of teachers, students and administrative staff and to provide each typology of users with tools adapted to their needs. For example, it allows us to set up an automated software development chain (DevOps chain with continuous integration) allowing the realization of realistic development projects that comply with the best practices currently in use in both large ESNs and startups!
23 June 2021