The Gateway to your IT – (New) Functions of the UCS Portal

Designing UCS Portal comfortably with Visual Composer

Using the example of a UCS@school installation, I would now like to explain to you how you can effortlessly carry out the basic configuration of the portal using a so-called Visual Composer.

To access the Visual Composer of the portal page, you must first log in as a user with administrative rights at the top right of the portal page. From version 4.3 v6, UCS@school comes with a preconfigured demo portal that allows you to experience the possibilities of a portal page, which are likewise offered by UCS.

Creating your own categories according to your wishes

The UCS portal page is made up of categories. In our example these are “Collaboration & Communication”, “Creativity” and “Administration”. To each category belong so-called “Entries”. In our example these are “Mail”, “Chat”, “Calendar” etc., below the category “Collaboration & Communication”. You can adjust the preconfigured categories via the edit button. You can create new categories in the lower part of the portal page using the “Add category” button.

Determining the right portal page for each purpose through the UMC

You can make further settings for the portal page in the UMC under Domain → Portal Settings.

Here you will find a list of all objects related to the portal, differentiated by the type of Entry, Portal or Category. You can use the portal type, for example, to add a new portal or set up local portals for individual servers. You could, for instance, differentiate between a customer or student portal that can be accessed from the Internet and various employee portals for internal use that cannot or can only be accessed remotely under certain conditions.

Using the UCS@school demo portal, I would now like to briefly describe the various settings you can configure on a portal in general.

Similar to a footnote, you can also set static links for your portal in the “Footer” of the page, such as an About or GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) page.

You can store the static links as html files, in this example about.html and gdpr.html, on the master in the directory /var/www/.

These links then appear on your portal page as shown in the screenshot and lead the user to the associated websites.

Under the tab “Portal categories and entries” you will find an overview of the categories and entries of the portal, which you can also move and customize here.

The “Add” command allows you to create new entries for the portal under “Portal Settings” – the same way you use the Visual Composer.

New since UCS version 4.4 is that the handling of anonymous, i.e. not authenticated, users can be adapted. Under “Manage anonymous visitors”, you can force a login by redirecting visitors to a login screen, or display the portal without entries with a notification window requiring them to log in.

The technology behind the portal

But improvements have also been made “under the hood”. Thus, the new technical foundation of the portal enables a better security of the contents on the server side and serves as the expandable technical basis for future functions that our development department is planning.

Also new are additional possibilities to adjust the appearance of the portal via an own CSS. In order to customize the portal even more to your visual requirements, there is the possibility since version 4.4 to make further design adjustments in the file /usr/share/univention-portal/custom.css.By the way, this file is not overwritten when updating to a newer UCS or UCS@school version.

As you can see, with version 4.4 we have significantly extended the portal in terms of functionality and usability and made it easier to log on to the portal. Please do not hesitate to give us your feedback on how you like the new features and where you still see potential for improvement. We are excited to hear from you.