How to Install Open Source SuiteCRM and Empower Sales

The core sales tool for every business in our increasingly data-centric world is customer relationship management (CRM). Your sales benefits greatly from CRM by collecting the best data of your leads. Likewise, marketing and general business planning also profit a lot from having the right information about customers and potentials. Using easy, web-based CRM tools, even the smallest business can utilize their power today.

Sales tool out of the box

There are numerous CRM solutions on the market, each with their unique advantages. In my opinion and personal experience the Linux-based software SuiteCRM stands out as it offers a comprehensive and easy to use user interface that is ready to use out of the box, but can also be easily adapted to your unique situation if needed. SuiteCRM provides easily understandable overviews of your customer engagement process. Apart from lead and contract management it also includes project management, invoicing modules, further extensions, and it is open source.

With the following installation and operation guide I like to help you get SuiteCRM set up and running. Look how you can manage it with ease via UCS!

OX in a Box: A Self-Contained Open-Xchange Environment for Containers and Virtual Machines

Schaubild OX in a box

Container technologies like Docker make it possible for service providers to easily offer separated, private environments containing Open-Xchange and other services at a low footprint. But usually management of these services is a challenge.

Univention provides a complete open environment to run and manage Open-Xchange inside Docker and popular hypervisors. This includes life-cycle, patch and identity management (IdM), a management GUI for customers, connectors to Microsoft Active Directory, and the possibility to integrate a dozens of other applications.

Cool Solutions – Redmine: project management

Redmine Logo

What are Cool Solutions?

At Univention we define Cool Solutions as solutions which expand UCSs with expedient and useful functions and which are deployed successfully by our customers. We regularly present these solutions in Wiki as Cool Solutions articles.

The Univention blog is a collection of the most popular Cool Solutions. Today, we will be looking at Redmine, a free project management software which we have been using in professional services for many years for internal administration and to coordinate customer projects.

UCC 3.0 Now Verified as Citrix Ready

A new major version of Univention Corporate Client (UCC), Version 3.0, was released in mid-August. Due to a problem with Citrix Receiver, however, Citrix was not fully supported in that version. Thanks to an update, it has now proved possible to resolve the issue, and complete Citrix support with UCS is now guaranteed once again.

The last release brought with it a changeover of the operating system basis from UCC 3.0 to Ubuntu 16.04 Long Term Support (LTS). The Ubuntu substructure allows users of UCC to benefit both from the large, continuously updated software selection and from the broad hardware support offered by Ubuntu’s use of the latest Linux kernel versions.

Integrate Cloud Service Google Apps for Work in UCS

Logo Google Apps for Work Connector
Browser-supported Office solutions such as Office 365 or Google Apps for Work (now G Suite) make mobile working much easier and reduce administrative efforts, because they are not anymore installed on the computer but run in the cloud. Administrators don’t need to maintain license lists anymore, nor do regular software updates, and incompatibility issues are a thing of the past.

With the connectors “Google App for Work Connector” and „Office 365 Connector“ we developed two apps that help you facilitate administrative tasks as well as make user access safer and easier. Administrators thus manage all users access centrally via UCS while the users themselves access the cloud services from within their working environment with their usual passwords.

In this short video we will show you how you can easily download and integrate the „Google App for Work Connector“ from the Univention App Center and integrate it in your UCS environment.

“Kopano to go, please!”

…or: How do I set up my own mail and communication server in just 30 minutes? That’s the question I asked myself when my daughter got her first smartphone and asked for an e-mail address. I needed something which was easy to use (I’m no Linux whiz) and compatible with both the web and smartphones, which also allowed me as a parent to retain some degree of control.

I published the following article on my own blog on August 13, 2016. And because what’s good for families with daughters of course can’t be bad for companies either, my colleagues at Univention thought it would be worth publishing here too.

UCC 3.0 released: Switch from Kubuntu to Ubuntu

UCC Univention Corporate Client Logo

This week we have published version 3.0 of Univention Corporate Client (UCC) our desktop solution for the operation and administration of PCs, notebooks and thin clients. An essential change in comparison to previous releases is the change of the technical basis from Kubuntu to Ubuntu. Our reason for this switch was that Ubuntu offers longer support terms (5 years) for the Long Term Support (LTS) Versions. Kubuntu 16.04 LTS only offers support for 3 years. Customers thus profit from a longterm support for UCC. With this switch the desktop environment was also changed from KDE to Unity. Unity was especially developed for Ubuntu by Canonical. To achieve a better overview of all UCC images installed in one environment, all actually installed client images will be reported to Univention Corporate Server (UCS) from now on. As UCS is the central identity management system for UCC, these images will then be displayed for easy search in UCS.

Univention App Center presented

Univention Corporate Server Logo

In this video tutorial we give you a short introduction into the Univention App Center. The App Center is a central feature of Univention Corporate Server which allows you to easily install and manage additional UCS components and business applications of third-party vendors. You can thus adjust your IT infrastructure to your personal needs at any time. One crucial and great benefit of the App Center is the central management of all apps including their users via the UCS management system.

More on this in the following video!

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Cool Solutions – Guacamole…Not Just a Dip!

What are “Cool Solutions”?

Cool Solutions is the name we use to describe Univention solutions which expand UCS with practical, advantageous functions and are also sometimes employed by our customers. These solutions are regularly presented in the Univention Wiki in the form of Cool Solutions articles.

In a new series of articles, we want to introduce you to the five most popular “Cool Solutions” over the next few weeks. Today we are starting with Guacamole – and no, we don’t mean the tasty Mexican dip this time.

Private Internet use requires clear rules

Frau chattet im social web am Laptop

When it comes to network security, one of the greatest security gaps is still the “human factor”, especially through private Internet use at the work place. In addition to private e-mails, the ever increasing reach of social networks is currently representing a great challenge. Viruses and other malware from the web seek out exactly these weaknesses. Attacks increase on a daily base and businesses in all industries and of all sizes, must implement ever more sophisticated standards for protection.