The Open Source/Linux Tech platform OSTechNix publishes another article on Univention Corporate Server (UCS). This time, they provide a detailed tutorial about the installation and configuration process of UCS.
The LDAP server in UCS, like the Active Directory on a Windows server, stores all the information on your domain about all your resources from hardware to employee as objects, namely in a structured and well-defined manner. Every object has some defined attributes of a particular type. Common attributes of a user object are, for example, the user’s surname, password and further valuable information on him. Part of the LDAP is the LDAP schema, which provides the administrator with a clear overview on all objects by describing which types of attributes exist within the LDAP and what attributes they have.
So, if you want to include additional attributes or create entirely new object types, extending the schema might be the way to go.
If you need to use various services online, which is by the way the norm, there’s nothing more conventient than using single sign-on (SSO). SSO allows you to log in to all available services in a domain with one password only. UCS provides this feature via the SAML Identity Provider since UCS 4.1.
We chose to implement SAML as the first single sign-on technology in UCS, because of its popularity in the enterprise sector, the high degree of security, and the positive experiences that we ourselves had made with SAML in the years before. Since then, a lot of services and Univention Apps already provide a SAML service provider. Now, we are working on integrating these into the UCS Identity Provider.
The Univention App Center makes it easy to install and set up a sophisticated collaboration solution on a stable basis. Univention Corporate Server (UCS) offers this basis – also for the integration with other open source solutions. EGroupware was created in 2003 and is thus one of the early collaboration solutions in the open source spectrum. For this reason, the product does not use proprietary formats at any point, but only open standards. At the same time, EGroupware uses other open source products as a basis, such as the LDAP directory service, Samba‘s file and print services and the MariaDB database. The open, cooperative approach to software development facilitates the integration of the groupware with UCS and other open source solutions.
The Open Source Tech platform OSTechNix published an introductory article to a series about Univention Corporate Server. This article provides a good understanding of what Univention Corporate Server is, its features, price and potential user group.
With Mattermost in the App Center, we now offer the first ChatOps tool in our wide range of solutions.
Mattermost is much more than just a normal chat tool. By combining people, tools, processes and automation into a transparent workflow, it is possible to raise conversation-driven collaboration to a new level. With the software you can organize all users in team rooms (public and private) and groups. Most of the communication then takes place in these team rooms. Of course, a 1:1 communication is also possible. Mattermost can be used in the browser or via a mobile app for iOS and Android.
The cumulative outages of the Amazon Web Services and the attacks on the global DNS network have shown that even large and supposedly professionally protected networks are endangered, too. These incidents also make us aware of the need to distribute critical infrastructures across multiple cloud providers. This distribution is particularly important for centralized authentication services, which provide users and permissions for various services and organizational offices. An outage of a single server system would be a catastrophe for services like AWS where thousands of users and their permissions would be affected simultaneously. This is why I would like to explain to you how you can safeguard your network against outages and criminal attacks. Even if the dimension of your network probably is not comparable to the one of AWS or the DNS network.
Thousands of organizations around the world use Univention Corporate Server every day. And the number increases week after week. The reason among others is that the Univention App Center contains, in addition to many UCS modules and extensions, dozens of professional enterprise applications from various vendors which can be easily integrated and maintained via the App Center. Therefore we are monitoring very closely which of these apps are really used and to which extent. Today, I would like to share some of the insights with you.
DHCP and DNS are the two fundamental services in an IT network. Whilst DNS makes sure that servers, clients, and services can be found in the network, DHCP ensures that the clients in the network are also provided with the information they require to participate in the communication.