Hi all,

we are a european company that loves Zotero; however, due to concerns regarding data security, we cannot use a foreign, US-based cloud for synchronizing our clients. Metadata, collection and comments are rather valuable to us, since we use it to add extensive additional information to references. After going through years of similar discussions, we're obviously not alone.

I was trying to set up the local dataserver from the sources on github, but so far failed after several hours of work. It is obvious that the Zotero developers have little intention to support local servers (there seems to be not even a about:config configuration to change the server's address). This is their decision and it's fine; the business model is obviously different.

Please reconsider this. Zotero is exceptional among all other reference management software we evaluated, not (only) because it's free, but mostly feature wise. We are willing to put quite some money into this; maybe some construction where institutions can pay for using a local server is an option? I understand it's open source, but the local server is hardly usable. Providing update scripts for paying customers only might be an option, or some similar construction.

Some more technical questions before diving back into the server setup:

- Is the server code still up-to-date with the current client release?

- Does the server code include migration between versions? I.e., if the database scheme is updated, do we need to wipe the server and reinstall, or is there a smoother option?

- Can the dataserver be set in about:config, or is there a plan to allow this?