Speaker
Description
Working in a University, in a diverse and dynamic community, makes it possible to observe the emergence of new digital uses. Dropbox and similar applications were the pioneers of file synchronization and sharing softwares, which use was largely utilized for research teams and teaching.
Indeed, the cloud storage is a very powerful system to develop collaborative work and increase autonomy. Moreover, this kind of tools is easily accessible for all users, thus regardless of the user computer skills.
However, external storage services are pointed out to be a potential security threat and a privacy issue. Furthermore, most of these services do not provide a data loss backup service.
That's why; we deployed Seafile as a cloud storage service at the University of Strasbourg for employees, researchers and teachers.
We started in May 2015 with 150 users, which some of them where identified as previously Dropbox users. Since then, in November 2016, we have more than 1000 different Seafile users per month.
In this paper, we focused on describing dedicated effort made on documentation, usability and training provided to heterogeneous panel of users: such as employees, researchers and teachers, experts or novices.
In the first part, we present and detail the change management methods defined at the Strasbourg University. This includes:
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Trainings: How we organized an experimental phase before deployment with advanced users: feedback, identification of levels and trainings strategy.
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Communication: How we present the tool and which channels we chosen: meetings with management and users, websites, mailing, print etc.
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Documentation: How we wrote documentation and why it is important for some users
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Feedback and User community: How we drive the community: use or satisfaction surveys, special contacts and educational tours.
In the second part, we present Seafile service evolution at Strasbourg University. The service is a great success. We believe that its use will continue to grow, especially with the arrival of SeaDrive and the opening of the service for students.
Thereby, we plan to set-up a new tool to drive a huge user community. We are currently working on a discussion forum based on Discourse. Seafile will be one the most important item. We hope this forum will facilitate exchanges between users, and help us to have interesting feedback.
For documentation, we would like to create some Seafile “How to” with French and German universities. We want to collaborate for the creation of multi-language adapted resources, e.g.:
- How to begin with Seafile?
- How to improve my use of Seafile?.
Finally, we will create video tutorials.
References (french):
Online documentation:
https://services-numeriques.unistra.fr/documentations/toutes-les-documentations/outils-collaboratifs/synchro-et-partage-de-fichiers.html
Satisfaction survey:
https://seafile.unistra.fr/f/9f90cf5572/
Example of press release with one of our partner:
http://www.lactu.unistra.fr/index.php?id=22479#c103028
