With the Point Release UCS 5.0-2, another important step has been taken for further developing Univention Corporate Server towards more accessibility, better usability, as well as the integration of services and their central management. In this blog article, I would like to give you an overview of the most important new features and improvements, such as the integration of Self Services into the UCS Portal, the introduction of service-specific passwords or various performance improvements in the use of DNS and LDAP, as well as an overview of the apps made available for UCS 5.

Integration of User Self Service into the UCS Portal

The Self Service, with which users can easily make adjustments to their user profile, verify their account or reset their password, has been integrated directly into the UCS Portal in UCS 5.0-2, making it even easier to access. The look and feel have also been adapted to the UCS Portal and the access has been made barrier-free.

In addition, UCS administrators now have more flexibility in designing e-mail templates for self service communication . For example, the email template for password reset now supports additional placeholders for title, first name, last name, organization, and more, making it even more intuitive to use.

With the new self service features, as of now users can also set specific passwords only for particular services, such as wireless network access via RADIUS. More about it in the next section.

Service-specific Password for RADIUS

Basically, every user in UCS gets assigned a domain-wide valid password that can be reset by the user via self service. With this password, users can access numerous services integrated in UCS.
We have newly implemented the capability of setting individual passwords for individual services. This was the first service to be implemented by our development department for RADIUS. Therefore, with this service-specific password, users can then log on exclusively to the organization’s Wifi. This separation can be useful, since Wifi passwords can quickly fall into the wrong hands if a mobile device is lost. If the same password is used for domain-wide services and Wifi, there would be access to all services the user has been enabled for in UCS.

Assignment of Separate Networks

With version 5.0-2, RADIUS now also allows administrators to assign dedicated VLANs to specific user groups. For example, visitors can be assigned access to a dedicated guest VLAN that allows access only to the Internet, but not to the organization’s internal network. This is an important feature for increasing network security.
For more info, see the blog article Service-specific Password for RADIUS .

Deployment of New and Updated Apps for UCS 5

Minor enhancements and bug fixes have been released for the App Center, which in detail can be found in the release notes. Here, we have focused on porting more apps to UCS 5 as well as the deployment of new apps.
As new apps were released:

  • Xwiki: Open Source Enterprise Wiki
  • ITISeasy.business: Modular Open Source ERP
  • Dovecot Connector: Synchronizes users to be deleted for Dovecot that is not installed on UCS.

The following apps have been made available for UCS 5.0 since 5.0-1

  • UCS Dashboard
  • itslearning
  • Microsoft 365 Connector
  • Apple School Manager
  • opsi Client Management
  • Guacamole
  • audriga Groupware Migration Service

In addition to the first release for UCS 5.0, there have been significant updates to the UCS Dashboard and opsi. In the UCS Dashboard, all modules (in the core Prometheus and Grafana) were updated and migration of the databases was also taken care of. opsi was updated to version 4.2, the new features are described in detail in the blog article UCS 5.0: opsi 4.2 in the Univention App Center .

UCS Dashboard

Many other apps in the App Center were also updated, such as : ONLYOFFICE, Nextcloud, m23, EGroupware, Kelvin REST API, OX-Connector, Collabora, UCS@school ID Connector, Wekan, Benno MailArchive, Relution, Jitsi Meet, and Webweaver.

 

Improvements and Enhancements from Current Updates

Point releases like UCS 5.0-2 bring all the errata updates from the last few months as a collected update. As always, the full list of changes can be found in the release notes [link], but I’d like to single out two improvements worth mentioning:

Better LDAP Replication Performance

The transaction protocol for replication between UCS LDAP servers now ignores temporary LDAP objects and thus reduces the required storage space and the number of replication operations. This significantly increases replication speed, especially in environments with many changes.

UMC with Updated French Translation and Improved License Check:

In UMC, an updated French translation for the UCS management system is now available with the new version of UCS. In addition, we have improved the license check processes to reduce the initial login time in large environments.

Release Notes

For a complete list of enhancements and bug fixes for UCS 5.0-2, please have a look at the release notes. If you have any requests or suggestions for improvements, we welcome your feedback – here on the blog or at help.univention.com.

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Matthias Weiß

Matthias Weiß has been working at Univention as Senior Product Manager since November 2021.

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