Short Introduction: How to Upgrade Your E-mail Server to a Bullet-Proof Fortress

E-mails have become an integral part in our everyday lives. In business anyway, but they have also found their way into our schools. However, schools face the same problems that have long been known by organizations: School authorities with thousands of students, hundreds of teachers and many administrative employees offer hackers a target at least as worthwhile as other large enterprises.

In this article, I’ll show you some simple yet highly effective measures that you as the administrator of a corporate IT or school IT can take to effectively protect your users and mail servers from hacker attacks. As massive spams are not only annoying or even dangerous to us all, they can also cause other mail servers to mistrust your email servers so that your users will no longer be able to send regular mails.

‘Vote for Apps’ End of 2. Round: Did Your Favorite Make It?

We’ve now finished the second round of the voting series ‘Vote for Apps’ in the Univention App Catalog which took place from February 9 to March 9. I thank all participants for their engagement and like to present the result today.

This time, you were able to vote for the Apps Cozy Cloud, a service to access personal data in the cloud, furthermore a connector to Dropbox Business as well as SOGo, an open source groupware server.

Central Domain Management with Samba and Active Directory

Graphic of a company's worldwide network

The release of UCS 4.3 also provides you with the Samba version 4.7 . Compared to older versions, it clearly improves the performance in the area of LDAP queries and replications of group memberships in particular. This offers great benefits, particularly for large organizations with several thousands or even ten thousands of authentication accounts.

But what is Samba in general? How can it be compared to Microsoft‘s Active Directory? Where is it involved in UCS‘s identity management and how can you benefit from it?

In this article I want to present you two solutions for the central detection and authorization of the members of a domain. Both of them enable you to centrally administrate a domain network. They also help to achieve more data protection and significantly increase failure security for your IT systems.

Besides, I want to show you how UCS is able to bridge the gap between the Linux world and the Windows world. By this you can reap the benefits of both systems, instead of having to decide for one and thus restrict yourself.

Data Ethics & Digital Selfdefense

Using a fake identity to trick Facebook, getting paid for jogging and how to book one and the same hotel room cheaper via VPN – in their keynote speech „Data Ethics & Digital Selfdefense“ at this year‘s Univention Summit, author Pernille Tranberg and journalist Steffan Heuer showed how big our digital footprint actually is and what information we (un-)consciously publish about ourselves on the internet.

Univention Corporate Server 4.3: Simpler, Faster, and More User-Friendly Administration

Bremen, March 14, 2018 – Univention is proud to present the latest Univention Corporate Server (UCS) release. Version 4.3 of the established Open Source software now allows administrators to customize the portal pages which can be set up in UCS to suit the specific requirements of their organization very simply via the drag and drop feature. In addition, they are also able to make the more than 90 enterprise applications in UCS’ integrated App Center available to users. The users access these applications via the portal pages and, insofar as the respective application permits, only need to log in once thanks to the single sign-on mechanism. Univention has also considerably improved the data import performance. In this way, UCS 4.3 allows smaller companies to administrate heterogeneous IT environments with ease and fulfills the requirements of larger organizations with tens of thousands of users at the same time.

Release UCS 4.3: Easy administration of portal pages, higher performance and single sign-on for apps

With UCS 4.3 we have integrated numerous security updates – most recently the Samba 4 update of March 13 – and closed hundreds of bugs. But not only, we also focused, among other things, on a significantly higher performance during data import and more convenience in the administration of portal pages or users, for example. In addition to an efficient and easy management of UCS, it was also important to us to create a positive user experience with UCS. Here, worth mentioning milestones are certainly a single sign-on during login to Windows or Linux desktops, which in parallel allows access to the Univention Management Console, Office 365, and ownCloud or Nextcloud, just to name a few of the improvements.

With UCS 4.3 we took another resolute step in the development of UCS into an open platform for IT operations and management in enterprises – whether it is a small organization with just a few users or organizations with hundreds of thousands of users.

Critical Security Update for Samba Published

Logo Samba

The Samba team discovered a critical vulnerablity in the access control of Samba/AD domain controllers. Any authenticated user can change other users’ passwords over LDAP including the passwords of the administrators.

We strongly advise to install the updated Samba packages for all UCS versions currently supported (from UCS 4.1-5 and UCS 4.2-3) which we have distributed today via the usual errata update channels.

Administration of Tablets in Everyday School Life with Mobile Device Management (MDM)

With the increased interest of schools to use tablets in classrooms, the Kreismedienzentrum Wildeshausen (media center of the district Wildeshausen) experienced a significant increase in inquiries for circulating tablets in 2015. In order to guarantee a safe operation of the equipment regardless of the location, the institution was faced with the task of organizing a reliable central tablet management.

Due to lack in personnel at the KMZA it was impossible to organize a manual device management, in which the tablets are connected to a laptop via USB cable and the subsequent MDM configuration is carried out individually.

In addition to the central tablet management, they planned to lend the devices to the schools as a so-called ‘suitcase solution’ and wanted to make remote maintenance possible.