The second preview of our upcoming UCS 4.0 release is available for download now. Along with UCS 4.0, the appearance and some fundamental usability aspects of the Univention Management Console (UMC) web interface have been reworked drastically. In this post, we would like to share with you some details about the new UMC.
General appearance and categories
As can be seen in the two screenshots above, the design has changed fundamentally. We wanted UMC to have a modern, clean and simple look and feel. As we believe, these are some of the basic properties of UCS in general.
For reasons of clarity and simplicity we decided to divide all UMC modules into more categories. Some of previous domain modules (e.g., “Users”, “Groups”, “Computers”, “Printers”) have now moved into the new categories “Users” or “Devices”. We created the category “Software” in which the modules “App Center” and “Software update” are found. On the overview page, the categories appear now more prominently and visually separate from one another. When launching UMC, only the most important modules of the category “Favorites” are shown initially. All other modules can be accessed via the new, coloured category buttons and – as with UCS 3.2 – they can be added to the favorites if desired.
In order to keep the appearance of the overview page uncluttered, we removed the icons from all UMC modules. Instead, each category has now its individual icon along with a unique coulor which is present throughout all of its modules. This simplifies the navigation as a module’s category type can be visually recognized immediately. Module entries of installed third party apps are still represented with icons on the overview page.
Responsive Design for domain control on any device
For a modern and up-to-date web interface, we designed UMC to be responsive. This allows to easily manage and control your UCS domain via your smartphone, a tablet computer, a notebook or any traditional desktop PC. Depend on the device screen size, the content will automatically adapt for an optimal representation of the UMC content.
Along with all these adaptations, we were able to improve the speed of launching UMC as well as launching new UMC modules. For UCS 4.0, UMC is based upon the JavaScript “Dojo Toolkit” in the latest version 1.10. For the implementation of its responsive design, we employed the CSS features of the framework “Bootstrap” in its latest version 3.2. The list of supported browsers now contains the following browsers with their corresponding minimum version:
- Internet Explorer 9
- Chrome 33
- Firefox 24
- Safari (+ Safari Mobile) 7
You find below some screenshots of different UMC modules in various sizes.
We would appreciate having your feedback on the new design of UMC. Let us know in the comments below!