How can a public administration provide schools and teachers with reliable digital services while avoiding dependence on individual vendors or closed ecosystems? And how can identity and access management (IAM) support this approach?

The Ministry of Education of Baden-Württemberg provides SCHULE@BW, a modular digital education platform as a service offering, to around 2,700 schools. More than 800,000 users are provisioned on the platform. The Digital Workplace (DAP) for Teachers is part of this platform and is used by around 80,000 teachers.

The DAP is designed as a centrally provided, browser-based and modular solution. It provides teachers with central functions for their everyday school work, including email, calendar, contacts, tasks, file storage and collaborative document editing. Its open-source components are bundled and interconnected through Univention’s IAM Nubus. This enables integration with SCHULE@BW through OpenID Connect, single sign-on and single logout. The current DAP implementation is based on openDesk and includes Open-Xchange, Nextcloud and Collabora Online. Further open-source components, including Moodle BW, Threema, F13 and BigBlueButton, are part of the wider SCHULE@BW ecosystem.

This talk covers the integration via SCIM for Identity provisioning and OpenID Connect for Single Sign-on, the migration from dPhoenix to openDesk during the summer holidays 2025, and practical challenges including operations under high load, maintenance windows, security, support, accessibility, usability and user acceptance. Attendees will learn why digital sovereignty requires modularity, reliable operations and support in addition to open-source technology – and what other public-sector organisations can learn from SCHULE@BW.