Easier than you may expect – How you gradually implement an IDM for larger organizations

Quick question: when an employee leaves your or your customers’ company, how many systems do you have to touch to disable all of their IT access rights? If your answer is more than one, you should think about introducing or improving an Identity Management System. An Identity Management System, in short IdM, takes care of your employees, their authentication, and the roles and privileges they have within your IT environment. However, adding an IdM is often seen as a difficult task. This does not have to be the case! Thus, let me show you how you can quickly introduce UCS as your identity management system while keeping most of your services intact.

Wekan: The Open Source Kanban Board as Alternative to Trello

screenshot-wekan-board
Whether you’re maintaining a personal TODO list, planning your holidays with family or friends, or working in a team on your next revolutionary idea – Kanban boards are a great way to organize tasks, visualize a project’s current state, and become more efficient. They also make it easy to focus and detect potential problems, i.e. bottlenecks in a project or a deadline coming closer. They bring more transparency for all team members and make it possible – if the board is managed well – to take over atasks, if a colleague is absent. And last but not least, it is hard to imagine agile and scrum based projects without them.
There are plenty of Kanban solutions out there, but if you’re looking for an Open Source alternative to Trello, Kanban Tool, Airtable, ClickUp, etc., then check out Wekan . The software is distributed under the MIT license and now available in the Univention App Center – so, it’s easy to integrate in Univention Corporate Server.

Discovering Your Very Favourite Apps – The New App Suggestion System in Our App Center

At Univention, we are constantly thinking about how we can add benefit and value to our Univention Corporate Server (UCS) and App Center. One idea born from this is the app suggestion system, which I would like to introduce to you in this article. I would also like to give you some insight into how we work with hypotheses & tests in such projects at Univention. Plus, you will learn how, contrary to many other systems, we at Univention have given top priority to the protection of personal data.

Film Tutorial: Providing Central Mail Services in UCS

In our 7-minute film tutorial we will show you how to set up your own e-mail server with UCS. You will first learn why you should install the UCS Mail Server component from the Univention App Center on a UCS slave and how to proceed with the installation. When configuring the server, we will show you how to ensure that users can receive and send e-mails. At this point we will briefly go into the subject of e-mail quota.

Unclouding: UCS-Apps as SaaS-Alternative

Not only since the discussions about the GDPR last year, security and data protection have returned to the attention of both companies and users. Following the trend to move as much as possible to the cloud, there are now again conflicting approaches: The “unclouding”, that is the return from the cloud to on-premise solutions on the one hand or the operation of own systems in IaaS environments (Infrastructure as a Service) on the other.
In the following, I will briefly examine the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and show how users can operate IT services securely and, most importantly, at their own command. Naturally, the services which users can integrate into their environment from the Univention App Center play an essential role for us.

Point Release UCS 4.4-1: performance improvements, app recommendations and UDM REST API Beta

Our first point release of UCS 4.4 includes all minor improvements and bugfixes of the Errata updates released over the past months, but it also brings some exciting new features.

Univention Directory Manager (UDM): More performance, improved functionality and a new REST API as beta version

There are significant performance improvements for managing the contents of the directory service via UDM, especially for application scenarios with complex structures. There have also been further minor improvements in DNS management, where the search for IP addresses is now enabled in further modules, as well as in the use of standard containers of domain controller objects.

OpenProject 9 with new Boards for Agile Project Management – download now in the App Center

The new version 9 of the open source project management software OpenProject includes new Agile Boards and therefore supports even better classical as well as Agile project management, such as Scrum and Kanban.
The main advantage: teams can manage their projects in a classical approach via waterfall as well as steer projects or subprojects in an Agile approach – included in one software.
OpenProject can easily be installed via the UCS App Center. For comfortable user identity management, OpenProject is integrated in the UCS LDAP. An upgrade for existing users to the new version is possible via the App Center.

Free ONLYOFFICE given tabbed interface and other extended version features

ONLYOFFICE is a collaborative office suite for working with documents, spreadsheets and presentations in UCS. It is combined with either Nextcloud or ownCloud and installed from Univention App Center casually (Docker-based) or as a pre-configured virtual appliance. You can also integrate it in UCS LDAP to manage all users. Read this article to learn about the latest and likely the most extensive update in ONLYOFFICE Document Server.
Free open source ONLYOFFICE Document Server has caught up with the advanced version, ONLYOFFICE Integration Edition, in functionality. This means that all features including the tabbed interface layout, Content Controls, navigation and many more are now available for small teams using the the community version of ONLYOFFICE. The update also includes novelties newly introduced in version 5.3.
For bigger organizations that rely on higher number of employees and seek professional technical support, ONLYOFFICE still offers its business-scale solution.

UDM REST API (beta version) released: The new interface for accessing all content in the directory service

With the beta release of the REST API for the Univention Directory Manager (UDM), a preliminary version of the future standard interface for the integration of applications with the Univention directory service is available. In the following, I would like to give you a brief overview of the objectives and use cases regarding the current status of the API and encourage you to test it – we look forward to your feedback for further improvements for the final version!

What is the „UDM REST API“?

A “REST API” (also called “RESTful API”) is a web service that allows integration between applications.
The REST API of the Univention Directory Manager provides access to all contents of the Univention Corporate Server (UCS) directory service. Its functionality is therefore comparable to that of the already available and further existing scripting interfaces (e.g. the “udm” command line tool). In contrast to these, however, the API is accessible via the web through HTTPS and can be more easily integrated into existing applications using standardized data formats (JSON).

Schools in the District of Kassel: Managing iPads Centrally With UCS@school

In the district of Kassel, our team of 12 is responsible for the IT support of a total of 72 schools (49 elementary schools, 14 high schools, 3 grammar schools, 2 vocational schools, and 4 special needs schools) and around 27,000 user accounts (approx. 25,000 pupils and 2,000 faculty members). We take care not only of the hardware (server, PCs, iOS devices, etc.), the network, and the telephone systems, but also of the operating systems, software, and mobile device administration.
In this blog article, I would like to describe the challenges we encountered as a district with a large surface area and a multitude of small, spread-out boroughs when it came to allowing the use of mobile devices in our schools and keeping the efforts associated with the introduction and support to a minimum at the same time.