 This is going to be a timed session. We will see which runs out first my voice or the slide. As you all might hear, I'm a bit flu-ish. So please bear with me, I'm going to try my best so everybody could hear me clearly. And yeah, let's go. First of all, I would like to start off by thanking next slide. First, not only for the invitation which was extended to me, to attend this conference, but for the brilliantly awesome product that you guys are delivering at the moment. And I think for that you can give yourselves a great round of applause. I think, yeah. To give you an idea of the size of the North West University, FTE count is what people use when they issue you licenses for universities normally. There's a very funny way of determining your FTE count, but it basically boils down to about 6,000 permanent staff members that we have. The undergrads that you see there does not include our distance learners. We've started with quite a big distance project or a distance program rather, which takes those numbers way above 110,000. So that's about the size of the scale of the place. We've got three physical campuses located the furthest one about 300 kilometers away. So at the basis of anything that we implement at the university, remote assistance, scalability, those are the two words that you cannot get past. There's nothing you can do if you can't remote assist. And if it doesn't scale, well then it won't work for us. It's as easy as that unfortunately. Luckily Nextloud does not have that problem. So why Nextloud? A lot of people might ask why Nextloud or just why Nextloud. In short, we were very tired of having to recover data from external hard drives. Anybody who is familiar with the researcher knows that a researcher might go and accumulate loads of data, send that data set away for analysis The analysis comes back in the form of hard drives most of the time because that's the easiest thing to ship. And those hard drives I've learned comes back roughly, the cost is about upwards of 15,000 euros. So we've had loads of researchers coming up to us and saying, my data is gone, my data is gone, can you help me? And we said, well, no, you've been driving around with this thing in your cubby hall of your car in the sun for the past month. You've been carrying it your backpack, throwing it around at the house and you want us to recover the data because your hard drives in such a state that your computer won't even recognize the hard drive. Never mind the data. But we're IT, so we have to fix anything from telephones to data to whatever. The next reason was legislation. In our country, I'll touch on that a bit later, we basically had to implement something where people can work on a collaborative basis, store their data safely and legally. So that was a big change for us. So you will see the confusion. This is what happens when you have multiple cloud solutions which are given to you by the biggest evils. Not supposed in that, but in any case. So Google, Microsoft, these guys, they have partners with education where you can basically buy your own domain from them. Then they will issue the students with unlimited storage space and we won't go into what happens to that storage once the students are not enrolled anymore, but it's truly unlimited storage space. So that helps you as a university not to have to think of the students where the data lives and have to provision loads and loads of storage and big data servers and loads of disk which you have to keep up over a long period of time. So that solved one part, but these guys stores their stuff in the cloud and some of our laws don't allow some research data, especially if it's ethical data to leave the borders of the country. That's a big problem for us because most of these giants don't have data centres in South Africa themselves. Their data centres are located in Ireland or the USA or wherever. So it's not allowed to go there. The how is easy because everybody understands that. So we implemented a load balancer through which all of our clients connect. All of the users has a single URL, they go through that. We have two app servers in the background running on a least-con basis. We have one MariaDB server, which I know is not the ideal for the 6,000 users that we have, but at the moment it's still keeping up as the users slowly come in. It's still keeping up so we'll keep an eye on that and expand as needed. We have one NFS server which is then underpun by SIF and the SIF storage makes it easy for us to expand the storage capability as we grow in the amount of research data that comes in as well as the amount of normal end-user data that comes in and as the users grow. Then we have a Redis server and our provisioning to NextLoud is done by a grupper. There's the URL for any of you not familiar with it. So we create a big NextLoud group and all of the users that are allowed to go into this group based on business rules, they are allowed to access NextLoud. I like to think that this lessens the load on the LDAP servers as well and it speeds up the response in NextLoud itself so you will end up with a better user experience in the end. I don't have any statistical data to back that up but it's something that my logic tells me is supposed to happen. Access is granted by LDAP and then we have a collaborative server as well. One thing that I didn't put on here is that the authentication happens through J6's CAS and the nice SSO SAMAL app that you guys have for NextLoud. We've implemented that and it was an absolute breeze to get it working with CAS. So that makes it a lot easier as all of our other systems are also integrated with CAS. So yeah, GDPR. It's like summoning the demon or having your mother-in-law over for Sunday, afternoon lunch. It's just the one thing that you don't want to admit and it's the one thing that you don't want to say out loud. Unfortunately it's an evil that's going to stay and I think it's the first of many evils that we will have from IT's perspective in terms of your policies and your legislation that you will have inside of the university but luckily that has helped push the private cloud implementation worldwide quite a bit. I think personally that events like the Snowden movie that came out and the push for net neutrality in the USA as well as the California Consumer Protection Act. All of these things are drivers behind creating private clouds keeping your data and knowing where your data is and being in charge of your data at all times. I think this is a positive thing. So although we might not like the compliancy, I think it's a very great thing that has happened because especially in Europe and America I think a lot more of the general public is aware of what privacy actually means. For the past decade or so we didn't care. Well, we'll just give it to Google what are they going to do with it in any case. So it's fine, don't worry, let's just put it there. You'll see there, there's a right at the bottom, there's a called Poppy, that is our protection of personal information act in South Africa and that is the one sole act that has driven us to become compliant and implementing next law because that's the law that says no personal data is allowed to leave the borders of your country. Doesn't matter what you do, doesn't matter how you look at it, it's not allowed to leave. You can go into all the finer details of encrypting it and then sending it away for cold storage or whatever but in the end next law just makes it so much better because you know where your data is at. So again, that was one of the drivers to go to next law. The collaborator came as part or actually as a solution to one of the biggest drivers in our university in the past five years. We went through a major restructuring process. In the past we had the three campuses where you can have the same module or the same program on any of the three campuses but it was left up to the lecturers of that specific campus on the finer details of what they wanted to do with that module or that program. So you ended up with things like a bit of a different standard between the three campuses and you ended up with, well, people not collaborating, working together. Now the whole restructuring process was solely put in place to address that issue. So we now have a single reporting structure for all three campuses but that gave us a big headache in IT itself because all of a sudden you had three campuses of lecturers and people having to work together but they don't have a platform on which to do it. So you can send emails and you can share your documents like you were used to but that created mass confusion. One of the things that came out which they used next slide for which we never saw coming personally was the exam paper set up a business process where people would literally work collaboratively on the exam paper for that semester and then right before final submission they could all have their inputs into a single document which is filed in a single folder so everyone knows where it's at and that makes life easier especially if you have 6,000 staff members it just makes life easier. So again, thank you to next slide and to liberal both of them working hard in order to provide us with such a service because you took a large headache away from us. Then at the moment we still have Nevelle which some of you might be familiar with it provides both an identity management system as well as a storage solution. This has been one of our historic services which you could only access your what we call the P drive, the personal drive if you use the VPN service. Now, I don't know about you guys we have some physics professors in the late 70s still delivering research papers and they prefer blackboards and chalk. You're not going to tell that guy listen, you have to install this VPN first you have to ask people for access to the VPN then you have to install this VPN server then you can actually get your data if you want to go and present it at overseas conferences. That does not fly it will just tell you to go home and bring me my file I'll put another bag on the airplane or something I'll take the papers with, thank you very much. Next slide has helped with that as well having your data available anywhere, anytime at your disposal and you are in control of it. Again the control is an important part. So, what's next for us is some of it is fine some of it is stuff that we will be doing once I get back home and those are just a few ideas talk is something that I've been pushed vehemently by our colleague there to start implementing and I can understand why it's a brilliant service it's really a very nice service to use especially between users I do see talk as a possibility for videoconferencing at large institutions I really do especially with the inter encryption part as more and more people become aware of the data security behind videoconferences I think it's something that will definitely grow So, that's a maybe for us another thing is federation compliant universities we also self host next lab it will make it easier between universities to share their research data especially if you have to work collaboratively with another researcher at another institute on your data Yeah, and the other two things the last one is the one that we will be looking at quite early on and that's the elastic search integration for full tech search which there was a workshop on yesterday easy enough to install and again for an end user that's a big plus point so thanks again guys for the capability Yeah, okay so we have spoken in the hack week during this the top line just give you guys a quick idea it regards some business cases where you have people leaving the university and they have to hand over that data that they've been working on either research data or just personal administration documents etc so the one thing that we have spoken to the engineers about is maybe having some sort of service where the user can instigate this themselves through the web browser or through whatever process possibly so that they can then determine themselves to whom this data must go and the next OCC app in the background can kick it off on a cron job and make sure that this happens with all the rights and the shares and everything intact and I think I've made up time a bit so I was told to leave time for any questions if they're only I'm willing to take them if not then we can go on with the program