Email Service, Learning Platform and Unified User Identities – Bremerhaven Digitizes School IT

As a media center in Bremerhaven, we support a total of about 40 schools, 1,700 teachers and 17,000 pupils in the use of IT and other media. When we began implementing our digitization strategy in early 2015, the introduction of a learning management solution was at the top of our list of priorities. But even then, we were already considering offering further services, such as a service e-mail address for teachers. At that time, however, there was still no standardized database in which the data of all pupils and teachers was available to which a learning management solution or a e-mail server could be connected.

UCS: How to set up LDAP Replication

The central element of every identity management system is usually a directory service, a repository that stores and manages information like user profiles and access privileges, and network resources. Univention Corporate Server (UCS) uses OpenLDAP for this task.
If the directory service is down, many other services are no longer available. In this article we are going to show you how to plan a fail-safe environment for your UCS domain with LDAP replication, i.e., storing an exact copy of the data on multiple servers – this improves the reliability as well as the performance.

End of maintenance of UCS 4.2

The maintenance of UCS 4.2 ended on March 31, 2019. Users still using UCS 4.2 should update to a more recent version of UCS to continue to receive security updates, bug fixes, and minor releases. To update to the latest UCS version 4.4, you must first update to UCS 4.3. A description of the steps required for the update can be found in the release notes of UCS 4.3.

Collabora Online in UCS: get your own private office suite in few minutes

In this article I would like to introduce you to the most important features and benefits of Collabora Online, explain the possibilities of using it to meet data protection requirements together with Nextcloud or ownCloud, and show you how easy is to integrate and operate Collabora Online with Univention Corporate Server (UCS). You will also learn that Collabora Online in UCS offers a pre-built environment, pre-configured packages and a friendly UX that makes the integration process extremely easy and straightforward by including Nextcloud or ownCloud appliances preconfigured as data storage. At the end, you will get a short overview about the main differences between our two versions: Collabora Online Development Editon (CODE) and the supported Collabora Online, both available in the Univention App Center.

UCS 4.4: How to configure RADIUS

RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) is a central component of UCS and enables you to control access to WLAN networks for users, groups, and devices. In January we published a blog post with a short introduction to RADIUS, and in this article I’m going to explain how to set up RADIUS for your UCS domain. This article also covers the new features in UCS 4.4.

UCS 4.4 Release – Admin Diary, Self Services and Windows Domain Trusts

After the extensive updates of the basic distribution with the release of UCS 4.3, our focus during the development of UCS 4.4 was on the implementation of new functionalities: The enhancements include new functions in Self Services, in the Portal, in Radius Integration and in Services for Windows. In addition, the Admin Diary is a new app with which events on the different systems or in the management system can be tracked and commented.

Univention Corporate Server 4.4: More Security and Ease of Use

Bremen, March 12, 2019 – Univention has launched the latest release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS). The enhancements of version 4.4 focus on a number of new features, higher security and more comfort. With the application “Admin Diary”, UCS now supports administrators in making administrative activities traceable. For more security, password policies can be defined more strictly and flexibly with the new version. UCS 4.4 has also added support for trusts, which enables the integration of services operated in Microsoft domains. Users can now enjoy an enhanced Self Service that eliminates the need for numerous admin requests. At the same time as UCS, Univention is releasing an updated version of UCS@school specifically for schools and school authorities, making it much easier to connect to external services.