Videoconferences at Univention

In times of telecommuting they have become indispensable: videoconferences.

Anyone who frequently participates in them knows that nothing is more disturbing than distorted scraps of conversation and lagging interlocutors. A flawless transmission, however, enables employees to focus on the essential topic and exchange information about it, even in a digital environment. It adds up to a good feeling keeping control of the data when discussing internal company information or when talking to customers.

How To: Easily Evaluate and Permanently Operate Apps with Appliances

IT environments are a dynamic situation with changing problematics, requirements and needs of users. System administrators have to face these dynamics while maintaining IT operations. Therefore, they have to regularly deal with new software solutions and check whether they fit the requirements, needs and circumstances of their own IT environment. In this article, we want to show how Univention App Appliances can help with this. As pre-configured virtual images ready for immediate use with an integrated operating system, they can be used to quickly try out new software, switch it off if it fails to deliver the desired results, or, if the evaluation is successful, transfer the test solution to live operation.

UCS: How to Connect your Printers

In this article with corresponding how to film we are going to explain how to connect printers in UCS. Univention Corporate Server offers a printing system that can be implemented even in complex environments. Printers and printer groups are managed in the Univention Management Console, UMC for short. The print services are based on CUPS – that’s the Common Unix Printing System. The printer queues are managed by CUPS and UMC.
PPD files (PostScript Printer Description) describe the technical capabilities of the printers. These files contain information about the printers’ features, i.e. whether it’s a color device, whether duplex printing is possible, which paper trays are available, which resolutions and which printer command languages are supported (e.g. PCL or PostScript). UCS provides a variety of PPD files, so most printers can be accessed and configured without having to install additional drivers. If you have to set up extra PPD files, please have a look at our manual.

bitpack.io Introduces New UCS-based Solution at ImPuls e. V. Association

An outdated IT landscape, many different desktop systems with proprietary software and corresponding license costs had repeatedly confronted the administrators of the association ImPuls e. V. from Hohen Neuendorf, Brandenburg, with problems. A solution was sought that would make both setting up new workstations and maintaining already existing desktops easier. The responsible persons also desired the possibility of interconnecting all facilities while at the same time retaining full control over their data.
We, the company bitpack.io from Birkenwerder, have modernized the IT infrastructure of the association in recent months. The new systems are running since July 2019: Univention Corporate Server is the central component; furthermore Kopano, Nextcloud and OnlyOffice are being used. In this article we would like to briefly introduce you to the project.

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.

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.

UCS@school and Open-Xchange for Schools in Basel

For some time now, we have been looking for a consistent solution for the mail system used by our teachers and students. We need a secure environment that’s easy to manage. In a combined effort, ICT Medien and Adfinis SyGroup, a Swiss Service Provider, migrated the schools’ existing mail system with around 32,000 accounts. We connected the current identity management (UCS@school) to the e-mail and groupware solution Open-Xchange. In this article we’re going to describe the initial situation, talk about our considerations, the planning phase, and the requirements for the new mail and groupware solution. We’re also going to tell you about our system architecture and the servers involved. During the migration we encountered some problems – you’re going to read about them and about our solutions. Before we start with the more technical details, we’d like to say how happy we are with the new Open Source solution: The new mail system fulfils all requirements in terms of security, high availability, and the current data protection guidelines.

Journaling for Sysadmins: Admin Diary

“When did I install or remove which app, and when was the last time the password for the UCS server was changed?” Answers to these and many other questions can be found in the Admin Diary, which we introduced with UCS 4.4. It provides a quick overview of all administrative events in a UCS domain, such as software and app installations and updates, creation, modification and deletion of users and other directory service objects, password changes, etc.

Strictly speaking, the new diary consists of two apps that you can easily install in your UCS environment through the Univention App Center: the Admin Diary Backend and the Admin Diary Frontend. The backend collects data from all UCS instances in the domain and stores it in a database. The frontend provides access to this log via a module of the Univention Management Console (UMC) and displays the events.

In this blog article, I will introduce you to both apps and also explain how to run backend and frontend on two different computers. This may be useful, for example, if there already is a dedicated database server in your environment: Then you install the backend there. The frontend will be installed on that system, on which you normally use the UMC (e.g. the Master). Let’s start with the standard option: both on one system.

Simplifying Administration with User Templates – How To

UCS has always focused on centralizing and simplifying the administrative tasks related to the individual components of IT infrastructure. One of the many small tools that can simplify the life of administrators are the so-called user templates. In the following, I will describe how to create the necessary attributes to specify user templates, which for example will automatically create e-mail addresses for the users with their first name and last name in this always constant pattern. I will also show you which settings you need to make in order to apply these templates to different users in your UCS domain.