Nextcloud has announced that schools across six German federal states can now access a sovereign, open-source collaboration platform under a four-year framework agreement awarded to German cloud provider IONOS.
The agreement follows a public procurement process by govdigital eG and covers Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Rhineland-Palatinate. Other German states may join the framework later.
The initiative, known as KoDaS, gives schools and educational authorities access to IONOS Nextcloud Workspace, a cloud-hosted collaboration platform built on Nextcloud technology. However, adoption is optional, allowing individual schools and authorities to decide whether the service meets their requirements.
The platform provides file storage and sharing, online document editing, and communication tools for teachers, students, and school administrators. It supports everyday educational activities without requiring institutions to depend entirely on proprietary cloud services.
Under the agreement, IONOS serves as the main contractor, handling service delivery, operations, and the underlying cloud infrastructure hosted in German data centers. Nextcloud supplies the open-source collaboration technology.
A key objective is to give educational institutions greater control over their data and digital infrastructure. Using an open-source platform also delivers transparency into the technology and reduces dependence on individual software vendors.
Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek pointed out:
“Schools should teach digital skills, not dependency on individual technology providers. If we want future generations to make independent decisions about technology, we need to familiarize them with open source technologies from an early age.”
The agreement does not require schools in the six states to migrate to Nextcloud. Instead, it establishes a procurement framework through which eligible educational institutions may obtain the service according to their needs.
The announcement also follows the wider collaboration between Nextcloud and IONOS, which introduced Nextcloud Workspace in June 2025 as a European alternative to proprietary productivity platforms.
For more information, see the official announcement.
