UCS@school 5.0: Established System with a Fresh Look

A developer’s work is never done—after we published the fifth major release of Univention Corporate Server in May 2021, we’ve been keeping busy. Of course, we kept looking after our core product UCS, but we’ve also put in lots of hours to release UCS@school for UCS 5.0. In this blog post, I would like to present the new features of this major release and explain the importance for school administrators.

Admin Diary: Logging Activities in your Domain

Admin Diary
Every day, a lot of things happen in a UCS domain, for example, users log in and out, maybe forget a password and fail to log in to the portal, admins install software or remove apps that are no longer needed, change a forgotten user password, create new user groups or delete several accounts in one go…

Univention Corporate Server logs all these events and more. If you don’t feel like reading detailed log files and just want a brief overview of the events in your UCS domain, you can read the Admin Diary. In this article, I’m going to explain how to install and how to set up our diary for sysadmins. We’re also going to look at the information it offers.

New UCS training program

Neues Schulungskonzept 2021
The Univention Corporate Server (UCS) technical training has long been an established and essential part of our service portfolio. It ensures the successful use of our products UCS and UCS@school in organizational IT. In a two-day seminar, our customers received a detailed introduction to UCS. They learned about its administration and configuration and were able to consolidate their knowledge with the help of practical exercises. Further, they could ask questions about their individual use.

Integrate Nextcloud manually into UCS

Nextcloud manuell in UCS integrieren
The Nextcloud app has been available for installation from the Univention Appcenter for almost four years. It is a very effective way of making a functioning integration of the popular “File Sync and Share” solution into the management system of the Univention Corporate Server within a very short time. This is suitable for making the services of the Nextcloud hub available to a manageable number of users. On occasion, even to a larger circle of several hundred or thousand users.

However, the Docker-based integration has a few disadvantages due to its architecture, for which a Nextcloud installation on a different platform would be worth considering.

How does Single Sign-on work?

OpenID Connect SAML SSO

Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication process which allows users to log in to many different applications with only one set of credentials. They enter their username and password once and are automatically granted access to all programs and services which have been made available to them. After they have authenticated successfully for the first time, the SSO mechanism takes over and handles the authentication to all the other services.

Automatically manage Samba Shares in UCS and UCS@school

UCS Samba Freigaben
Whether you want to share files, printers or other services in your network – the Open Source software suite Samba is an incredible powerful tool which brings Linux, Windows and macOS client computers together. Samba can manage shares for users and groups, and since version 4, Samba can also take on the role of an Active Directory Domain Controller and thus replace the Windows directory service in a domain.

Light Theme for UCS 5

UCS 5.0 Logo zum aktuellen Release
We released UCS 5.0 at the end of May – one of the most important new features of the latest major release: the new design. The dark theme of the UCS interface appears during the installation, in the portal, the Univention Management Console (UMC) and its modules as well as all other web services for end users. You don’t like the new color scheme? No problem, we’ve just released a few errata, and erratum 23 provides a second, bright theme as an alternative. In this article, I’ll explain how to change the theme of all UCS web interfaces and switch to the light theme. I’ll also show you how to configure your own color scheme.

Pilot project combines identity management of UCS@school with BILDUNGSLOGIN

Pilotrojekt BILDUNGSLOGIN: Logos Univention und Verband Bildungsmedien
In cooperation with the Verband Bildungsmedien e.V. we will continue to improve digitization in education. The association has commissiones us to connect our identity management of UCS@school with their license management BILDUNGSLOGIN as part of a pilot project. It intends to provide teachers and pupils with simple access to digital educational media in compliance with data protection laws.