The messaging system of the University of Lorraine is based on Zimbra, a webmail often reduced to sending and receiving emails. The institution’s digital environment also integrates B’UL, a cloud storage and sharing service based on Nextcloud, with files hosted on the university’s servers. These two components form an ecosystem whose several functions remain underutilized by both students and staff.
Privacy and Data Hosting: What Sets Zimbra and B’UL Apart from Public Services
On public Gmail or Outlook, data passes through data centers operated by American companies subject to the Cloud Act. The University of Lorraine has made a different choice: documents saved in B’UL are stored on the university’s servers, in its own data centers. This location ensures that research work, digitized exam copies, or administrative data do not leave the institutional perimeter.
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Zimbra operates under the same logic. Emails exchanged between @univ-lorraine.fr addresses do not leave the internal infrastructure. For staff handling sensitive research data, this architecture avoids the need to manually encrypt each attachment before sending, which remains a common practice when using commercial email for professional exchanges.
Setting up an automatic forward to a Gmail or Proton address is technically possible, but it forfeits this guarantee of sovereign hosting. Notifications received on the cloud messaging system of the University of Lorraine lose their relevance if the actual content of the message lands on a third-party server.
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External Sharing from B’UL: Functionality and Little-Documented Limitations
B’UL allows sharing a file or folder with an external collaborator, such as a co-author affiliated with another institution. The mechanism relies on generating a share link, with or without a password, and with a configurable expiration date.
The difference with Google Drive or Dropbox lies in three points that users often discover late:
- External sharing does not grant access to collaborative editing by default. The recipient can view and download the file, but online editing via OnlyOffice (integrated into B’UL) requires an active university account.
- Files shared externally remain physically on the servers of the University of Lorraine. The recipient only receives a link, not a duplicated copy on a third-party cloud.
- The maximum file size uploaded and the total storage capacity depend on the profile (student or staff). The quotas are not the same as those of a typical self-hosted Nextcloud account.
For inter-institutional group work, this constraint leads to a hybrid usage: collaborative writing in B’UL among members of the University of Lorraine, followed by exporting the final document to a download link for external partners.
Mobile Use of Zimbra and B’UL: Synchronization and Restrictions to Know
Mobile access to Zimbra is through the ActiveSync protocol or by manual IMAP/SMTP configuration. On both Android and iOS, email synchronization works in a standard manner. However, synchronization of contacts and shared calendars requires specific configuration that the mobile interface does not automatically offer.
B’UL synchronizes via the Nextcloud app, available on Android and iOS stores. The app allows for automatic uploading of photos taken with the phone to a B’UL folder, a useful feature for staff on the move across the different campuses (Nancy, Metz, Épinal).
The main limitation concerns document editing on mobile. OnlyOffice, integrated into B’UL on desktop browsers, does not offer the same fluidity on smartphones. .docx or .xlsx files open in read-only mode, but real-time editing remains more reliable from a computer. Google Docs or Microsoft 365 provide a more advanced mobile experience on this specific point, which explains why some students switch to these tools for writing on the go.
Collaborative Editing and Tools Integrated into B’UL: OnlyOffice and Draw.io
B’UL integrates two editing tools directly into the web interface. OnlyOffice supports .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx formats, as well as interactive forms in .docxf format. Draw.io allows for creating diagrams and schematics in .drawio format without installing additional software.
Real-time collaborative editing works between users with a university account. Each modification is saved with a version history, allowing for restoring a previous version of a document without intervention from the IT department.
This combination covers the majority of needs for a university group project: shared writing of a report, tracking spreadsheet, presentation, software architecture diagram. The advantage over Google Workspace is that data never leaves the university’s servers, a significant argument for master’s theses containing survey data or unpublished research results.
The B’UL service was recently extended to all students after a phase reserved for staff. This gradual opening explains why some members of the university community are still unaware of these collaborative functions, often perceived as a simple storage space. The next time Zimbra displays a notification, checking whether the attached file could have been a simple shared B’UL link remains the most useful reflex to acquire.