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Our Univention Corporate Server (UCS) architecture documentation has grown with more content and will continue to grow. In this article, I will give you an overview of the newly added content, introduce another level of detail for administrators and solution architects, and share some of the experiences we have gained over the past few months with the new approach of iteratively delivering new documentation.
Table of Contents
The newly added section Product components in the documentation provides an overview of the UCS components that particularly administrators interact with. It briefly and clearly describes the most important components, functions and administration options of the UCS portal, the UCS management system and the Univention App Center.
In the section Services you will now find information on the following topics:
Figure 1: From the document: UDM architecture
To visualize the architecture, we are currently experimenting with ArchiMate, an open standard for enterprise architecture notation and modeling. With its focus on enterprise architectures, the notation is, in my view, excellently suited to visualize the architecture of UCS. As a useful side effect, creating the views creates a formal model that allows for further analysis.
Figure 2: Product components in UCS, visualized with the notation ArchiMate
With this experiment, we want to get away from lines and boxes with their own semantics, and use an established open standard that also conveys clear semantics to the reader.
Since my post UCS architecture documentation as an example of iterative writing, we have gained some insights that I would like to share:
Our next goal is to complete the product components. An overview of the contact points Command line and File and Print is still lacking. Subsequently, further content expansion in the area Services is on the agenda. This includes the topics LDAP, Listener, Hooks, UDM REST API, authentication (PAM, LDAP, Kerberos, OpenID Connect, SAML), Samba, networking, email, and monitoring. If you have any preferences for topic priorities, please let me know in the comments.
Of course, any feedback on the architecture documentation is more than welcome. Please use the feedback link next to each heading for this. The link appears in the HTML document to the right of a heading when you hover over it. Also here I will be happy to answer any questions. Leave a comment below the article.
Nico Gulden studied applied computer science and works for Univention since 2010. As technical editor he is responsible for maintenance and expansion of the product documentation. His spare time is dedicated to his family, reading, outdoor activities like cycling, photography, Geocaching and voluntary work with children and young people.