Univention Summit 2021: transferring a proven format to the web

The Univention Summit looks back on a 13-year tradition as a place of exchange and discussion around the topics of digital sovereignty and sovereign IT infrastructures. This year, for the first time, it had to be purely digital. This article looks back at the challenge of translating such an event, with all its interactivity and discussion spaces, from the real world to the virtual.
In order to realize the 14th Univention Summit as an online event, Univention approached us, Plain Schwarz, last year as an event agency and service provider for the conception and implementation of virtual, hybrid events as well as face-to-face events. We already knew each other through the Open Source environment and shared networks before we worked together for the Summit.

Bitwarden: Open Source Password Manager

Logos von Bitwarden und UCS mit einem Schlüsselbund in der Mitte
Apart from two-factor authentication (2FA), strong passwords are still your best protection against data theft. We already described how you can apply what are known as “password policies” in our article “Secure passwords for the UCS domain”.
In this article, we will go one step further. After a brief refresher on the topic of password managers in general, we will present a concrete software solution that offers a convenient way to store and manage passwords – so that none of your users have to rely on writing down their access data anywhere in plain text.

Better together: Sovereign Productivity Suite by Univention, Open-Xchange and Nextcloud for the public sector

We were happy to announce the Sovereign Productivity Suite (SPS) at the Univention Summit on January 29  In cooperation with our partners Open-Xchange and Nextcloud, we are delivering and developing a product combination that is specifically tailored to the public sector for office work and online collaboration as well as digital education offerings.

An introduction to DNS and its relationship with Univention Corporate Server

This article is about the Domain Name System (DNS) and explains how the “Internet’s telephone book” works. Alongside the fundamental details of name resolution on the Internet, we also look at special topics like administering DNS records in dynamic environments and debugging DNS setups during operation. We look at it within the technical framework of Univention Corporate Server, because it contains not only a dyed-in-the-wool DNS server, but also diverse tools to make managing DNS records significantly easier.

Exhibition of the open source industry: the Univention Summit 2021

On January 28, 2021, the 14th Univention Summit will take place. For the first time, it will be purely digital. Our CEO Peter Ganten will open the meeting with his keynote on “Digital Sovereignty: Spread Possibilities, not Dependencies”. In further presentations, you can listen to Frank Karlitschek (Nextcloud) talking about how to collaborate securely and efficiently, and Rafael Laguna (Federal Agency for Leap Innovations SPRIND) who will take a look at Europe’s digital future.

The future is now: OX delivers seamless video, voice and text integration

Bild vom OX User Interface auf einem Laptop
The world has changed dramatically in 2020, with people being forced to work in ways they never imagined this time in 2019. While many people have looked at working from home as an option over the years – and companies examined the practicalities – only a small percentage of the total workforce was working remotely at the beginning of the year. However, no one foresaw the rapid move to home or remote working that would result from Covid-19 restrictions across the world.

UCS 5.0 Beta: Preview of the new generation

UCS 5.0 Beta Release
We published the last UCS major release (UCS 4.0) in 2016. With UCS 5.0, we have now decided to go for an extensive update of the technical base and design of UCS. The first beta version of UCS 5.0, which has now been released, provides an initial preview of these updates. While testers are invited to try it, app vendors are offered a possibility to port and adapt their software. The beta version gives a glimpse of the new UI design and already provides some of the planned functions. However, this preview is not intended for productive use.

UCS 5.0 – Focus instead of feature overkill

Logo Effekt UCS 5.0
The variety of existing Open Source projects makes it easy to add new features to a modular product like UCS. The basic requirements for many things already exist and there are positive experiences with those software projects. At Univention, we pursue the goal of making these functions available to our users. In addition, we want to maintain the integration with our core components. This maintenance is definitely the larger part of the work, which is very noticeable during upgrades. One goal of UCS 5.0 is therefore to focus on the functions that strengthen the core benefit of UCS and to prevent that UCS will become unmaintainable due to feature overkill. Unfortunately, this means saying goodbye to functions and projects that won our hearts. Thus, we first have to close some chapters before we can rejoice over new features in future blog articles.