EGroupware in the Univention App Center: Group Dynamics of Bits and Bytes

Screenshot vom Kalender in EGroupware

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.

Univention Allows Schools to Manage Apple Devices Centrally via ZuluDesk

Bremen, October 26, 2017 – Univention, a specialist in IT and identity management, is now offering its customers yet another option for the central administration of Apple devices. With ZuluDesk, developed by ZuluDesk BV, the Dutch developer of software solutions for use in education, education facilities can now use the user accounts created for teachers and pupils in Univention’s UCS@school solution in ZuluDesk with the greatest of ease – plus, it also allows centralized administration of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks.

ChatOps Solution Mattermost Now New in the Univention App Center

Logo der ChatOps-Lösung Mattermost

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.

Step by Step Guide to a Multi-Server Environment for Effective Protection against Outages and Network Attacks

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.

Use of Univention Corporate Server: Our 3rd Party Charts

Univention App Center Charts

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.

ONLYOFFICE joins the Univention family

Users and providers of Univention Corporate Server now can add ONLYOFFICE Online Editors to their infrastructure from Univention App Center.

ONLYOFFICE is now a part of the Univention App family and complements it with a full-scale collaborative suite that offers editors for text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It is 100% compatible with Microsoft Office files and supports all popular document formats.

New: UCS 4.2 App Appliances in Own Corporate Branding

Our App Center team has been busy as usual, releasing four Apps from the Univention App Center as App Appliances. An App Appliance bundles UCS and an App in a virtual machine. The Appliances are available for the virtualization and cloud formats KVM, VMware, and VirtualBox. In addition to the pre-configured App, they also contain a pre-configured UCS system and a management system for administrating the App itself and its users. App Appliances are thus a particularly easy way to start an App without having to install it via the in UCS integrated Univention App Center.

Shed Light on the “IT jungle” with a Domain Controller

Image of a man with code in the background
The professional structure of domains and the use of domain controllers bring order to IT infrastructures. This is especially important when organizations are growing rapidly. Professional domain management allows their IT to grow dynamically. Otherwise, the infrastructure becomes a kind of “patchwork carpet” of many small solutions and unorganized resources, some of which act independently of each other, may interfere with each other and thus require a high level of maintenance. Not to mention the complexity of maintaining users twice as often and the risks associated with data replication, data protection, and system reliability.

In the following article, we first explain briefly what a domain is and then describe the tasks of a domain controller. Finally, we become practical and see how the concept of “domain/domain controllers” has been implemented in Univention Corporate Server.

Univention Corporate Server 4.2-2 released

One of the highlights of the second point release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) are the significant enhancements UCS 4.2-2 offers for managing services and apps that are hosted in public cloud services such as the Amazon Marketplace. Services installed on UCS can now be accessed directly without any further configuration effort. Our development department has extended access to these services via the UCS Portal by converting the links to relative links. For portal entries for which there are several links, heuristic procedures determine the best link.