In the upcoming weeks we will publish a step-by-step guide to the first steps with Univention Corporate Server.
In todays first film we give you an overview about the upcoming topics.
Even if you only have a small number of staff, the administration of individual user accounts for numerous applications and the corresponding access rights can still prove very time consuming. When responsibilities change hands or when new members of staff join the company at the latest, the IT infrastructure becomes characterized by uncontrolled growth, which not only requires a lot of time to handle, but also becomes more and more insecure over time. More often than not, the administration of the users and their rights gets neglected at some point. As the enterprise expands, this type of out-of-control infrastructure becomes more and more risky and dangerous. Centralized user management in the form of an identity management system can help you to rein your IT back in again.
The beating heart of an identity management system is often a so-called LDAP directory service, which is also integrated in our Univention Corporate Server. LDAP stands for lightweight directory access protocol, so it really only describes the protocol itself, although people also tend to talk about “the LDAP” when they actually mean the LDAP directory service.
As manager of Univention North America, I often find myself working on the go. While free WiFi and mobile Internet are slowly bridging the gap between the office, airport lounges and hotels, connections are often slow and congested whenever many people are congregating.
While many office documents can still be worked on when on the go, synchronization with the office and collaboration with coworkers are still difficult, especially, if you have to consider questions like data and transmission security, including secure access to the company network, travel across time zones or, oh horror, the date line and slow connections.
Of course, travel needs are not the only reason, why you would want to look at these applications, for synchronization and collaboration can also greatly benefit teams that work at multiple locations or colleagues frequently working from home. In the end, nothing is worse than finding out that an employee has uploaded much of the companies confidential knowledge base to a cloud service, because tablets, smart phones or collaborations are words that the IT office can’t be bothered with.
It’s not just in our working lives that digitalisation is constantly gaining ground; the number of digital devices we use at home is also increasing on a daily basis. A family of four or a shared flat can easily boast a formidable number of different devices and applications. It gets even more interesting when friends come to visit and want to play a movie on your television or use your printer. And it gets downright complicated if all these digital devices have to interact with each other too! In such cases, the requirements are often hardly any different from those of a small company, and the need for more comprehensive functions soon arises.
Many people already have a small home server at home, even if they don’t realise it. Boxes like QNAP, Synology and the like are often used for central file storage and as media servers, and these little boxes can really do much more than you’d think. So why not tap the existing potential?