CERN is one of those ownCloud customers who challenges our product continuously. The number of and variety of demanding users, the dazzling amounts of data and the unique setup ownCloud has to integrate with has provided us with an inspiring and educational use case. As one result, CERN is part of the open Cloud Mesh initiative which aims to enable file sync and share between research institutes and universities across the globe.
But CERN has been more than inspirational. Being a research institution with ties to many scientific institutions and an attitude of collaboration, sharing and learning, CERN has also shown the benefits of the open model of ownCloud development. CERN employees interacted beyond the formal ties with the company, giving feedback directly to the ownCloud community. Much bigger, as part of the CERN efforts to integrate ownCloud in their infrastructure, an automated testing tool was born: Smashbox. This has been made available in GitHub, where both CERN and ownCloud develop their open source software. ownCloud has picked up Smashbox, integrating it in our testing process and adding to and improving its tests, contributing the changes back to CERN.
You can learn all about Smashbox and how ownCloud and CERN have been collaborating on this testing tool in ownCloud, CERN and Smashbox and Smashbox in Action on the owncloud.org site.
It provides a great example of how the open nature of ownCloud can be directly beneficial for a customer as well as ownCloud as a project and product.
