[vhakulinen]

You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems.

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

[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...

[brodouevencode]

> You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around.

If the UK universities are anything like the US universities this is near impossible to do. Maybe COVID has changed some things but when I worked in the university system (state run) it was more about who could woo what administrator. The amount of waste and nepotism would make your head spin.