[nanna]

The problem is that Microsoft are good at selling a product which just works out of the box and is just about sufficient, even if it's not tailored to your use-case. Plus there's so little transparency as to how much they're charging my university, or how many hours wasted there are, so it's hard to make a price-comparison.

Student participation in some of the projects could work for certain modules, but only as experiments -- again we've been specifically prohibited from spinning up our own solutions.

> Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.

I agree that ultimately what needs to happen is that those of us who care about FLOSS need to organise and try to chip away at the corporate one-size-fits-all dependency syndrome at the university. The kinds of data ownership debates happening in Germany seem very far off here. The British university is in retreat. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/10/uk-univers...