NextCloud, Open-Xchange and Univention partner to create Sovereign Productivity Suite

Bremen, January 29, 2021 – Three of the biggest names in Open-Source software, Nextcloud, Open-Xchange and Univention, have signed a partnership agreement to join forces to develop and offer a complete suite of software specifically for the public sector – the Sovereign Productivity Suite (SPS).

Combining products already proven in the market with more than 100 million users, SPS will integrate best of breed Open-Source software from each of the partners. The suite will include an online user portal for easy access to mail, calendar, contacts and tasks, along with online file sync and share, video conferencing and chat, user management features, and an Appstore.

Exhibition of the open source industry: the Univention Summit 2021

On January 28, 2021, the 14th Univention Summit will take place. For the first time, it will be purely digital. Our CEO Peter Ganten will open the meeting with his keynote on “Digital Sovereignty: Spread Possibilities, not Dependencies”. In further presentations, you can listen to Frank Karlitschek (Nextcloud) talking about how to collaborate securely and efficiently, and Rafael Laguna (Federal Agency for Leap Innovations SPRIND) who will take a look at Europe’s digital future.

The future is now: OX delivers seamless video, voice and text integration

Bild vom OX User Interface auf einem Laptop
The world has changed dramatically in 2020, with people being forced to work in ways they never imagined this time in 2019. While many people have looked at working from home as an option over the years – and companies examined the practicalities – only a small percentage of the total workforce was working remotely at the beginning of the year. However, no one foresaw the rapid move to home or remote working that would result from Covid-19 restrictions across the world.

Univention records above-average growth in 2020

Bremen, January 5, 2021 – With its solutions for the secure, independent and efficient operation of IT infrastructures, the Bremen-based open source vendor Univention achieved an increase in sales of more than 35% in 2020 compared to the previous year. The company was able to triple the number of users of its solution UCS@school in the education sector in the past months, now recording around 1.5 million users. 16,000 active instances of the core product Univention Corporate Server (UCS) are used in organizations with an enterprise subscription or as a free core edition.

UCS 5.0 Beta: Preview of the new generation

UCS 5.0 Beta Release
We published the last UCS major release (UCS 4.0) in 2016. With UCS 5.0, we have now decided to go for an extensive update of the technical base and design of UCS. The first beta version of UCS 5.0, which has now been released, provides an initial preview of these updates. While testers are invited to try it, app vendors are offered a possibility to port and adapt their software. The beta version gives a glimpse of the new UI design and already provides some of the planned functions. However, this preview is not intended for productive use.

UCS 5.0 – Focus instead of feature overkill

Logo Effekt UCS 5.0
The variety of existing Open Source projects makes it easy to add new features to a modular product like UCS. The basic requirements for many things already exist and there are positive experiences with those software projects. At Univention, we pursue the goal of making these functions available to our users. In addition, we want to maintain the integration with our core components. This maintenance is definitely the larger part of the work, which is very noticeable during upgrades. One goal of UCS 5.0 is therefore to focus on the functions that strengthen the core benefit of UCS and to prevent that UCS will become unmaintainable due to feature overkill. Unfortunately, this means saying goodbye to functions and projects that won our hearts. Thus, we first have to close some chapters before we can rejoice over new features in future blog articles.

LDAP replication: ensuring fail-safe performance and reasonable load distribution

Server in use

It is well-known among IT staff members: the administration tasks (for multiple applications and depending access rights) which apply even with a small amount of users can prove to be very time-consuming. With possible changes of responsibilities or the joining of new staff members, chances are high that uncontrolled growth arises quickly within the IT infrastructure. And not only does this procedure take a lot of time, but it also endangers the security of your system after a while. A common consequence: the administration of users and their access rights becomes a nuisance and tends to get neglected. If not taken on in due time, this problem grows in parallel with the company and will, eventually, cause quite a bit of trouble. To get back in charge as soon as possible, it is recommended to establish a centralized user management in the shape of an Identity Management System.
Quite often, the so-called LDAP directory service (which we have also integrated in UCS) is the core of the identity management system. Meaning „Lightweight Directory Access Protocol“, it rather describes „only“ the protocol itself, even though users tend to adress „the LDAP“, while in fact talking about the LDAP directory service.