Univention Summit: “Shift happens” on the Road to Digital Sovereignty

Bremen, May 20, 2022—Digital sovereignty can and must become a reality in order to secure the innovation and economic growth of Germany and the rest of Europe—all participants at this year’s Univention Summit agreed on this. In his keynote speech, founder and CEO Peter Ganten claimed that we need to learn a lesson from the pandemic and the ongoing war—it’s time for a true digital turning point. “Shift happens—Let’s create a better IT now” was this year’s motto of the Univention Summit. The event has truly developed into a trend-setting get-together for thought leaders, decision makers, and users of digital sovereignty and digital education.

The future is UCS 5

End of UCS 4
In May 2021, the release of UCS 5 took place. Important changes are:

  • New design and improved user interface
  • Expansion of Univention App Center
  • New core: Debian “Buster” and Python 3
  • Simplification and concentration on the essentials

Since the release of UCS 5, installations have been increasing daily. New systems are being installed and existing UCS 4 systems are being updated.

Univention ID Broker: GDPR compliant Broker

ID Broker: ID Vermittlungsdienste für Schulträger und Schulen
On May 11, 2022, we released the new Univention ID Broker to simplify the integration of educational portals and educational SaaS services (Software as a Service) in schools’ IT environments. The broker acts as intermediary service and connects UCS@school (serving as identity management system at school boards, states, and individual schools) with different external services, like learning management systems, digital media, and other educational offers. As a result, students and teachers can log in with their usual credentials to access their personalized and familiar environment. Here they get immediate access to all connected and enabled services (single sign-on).

20 Years of Univention: strong Growth and enhanced Management

Bremen, March 15, 2022—Univention, leading provider of open source identity management and application integration solutions, has closed fiscal year 2021 with high double-digit revenue growth. “Our growth especially in the Education and Government business areas with more than 1.5 million users relying on our solutions, clearly shows: our offer is attractive to all organizations who want to achieve Digital Sovereignty with modern, flexible and open source based solutions”, comments founder and CEO Peter Ganten on the track record. “I am sure that the growing need in public and private clients to improve their control and innovation capabilities in digitalization will ensure similarly high growth for our company in the coming year.”

UCS 5.0: opsi 4.2 in the Univention App Center

The fifth major release of Univention Corporate Server was published in May, 2021. As announced back then, not all apps were immediately available, but migrated step by step. As of now, opsi 4.2 is available in the Univention App Center: one version for the predecessor UCS 4.4-x and one version for UCS 5.0.

Together with the Univention developers and the App Center team, we at uib gmbh have built and tested packages for our open source client management system. As a result, opsi works on UCS 5.0. I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the most important features of opsi 4.2 in this guest article.

Peter Ganten in Kommune21: Public authorities need alternatives!

The ministries are considering implementing a federal cloud. So-called hyperscalers such as Microsoft and Google come into question for this. But this involves dangers, which Peter Ganten discusses in an article in Kommune21:

The operation of the cloud software of the hyperscalers by European companies should solve this problem. However, the manufacturers can install or retrofit backdoors with updates at any time – for example, in order to provide security authorities in other countries with targeted information.

Likewise, the specification of defined interfaces for connecting specialized procedures and applications severely limits the flexibility of public institutions and leads to a much greater security risk, as this can just as easily be controlled and exploited by third parties, according to Ganten. You can read about the solution he sees for these security risks at kommunale21.de (available in german).

New in EGroupware 21.1: Placeholders, and automatic generation of PDF/PNG

A new EGroupware version is available in the Univention App Center, and it offers some cool new features. For example, users can insert all data stored in EGroupware into Collabora Online directly via a new dialog, and not just via placeholders.This way, only a few clicks are necessary to include entries from the address book, calendar, timesheets, etc. into an office document—say good-bye to the tedious copy & paste sessions between EGroupware modules.