First milestone of UCS 4.2 Released

We are very pleased to present the first milestone of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.2. The milestone is for our system house and technology partners, app providers and interested parties, who want to take a first look at the upcoming release of UCS.

This milestone provides a preview of the new UCS portal, which makes it easy for end users to find installed apps in the UCS domain.

In addition to the updated Debian base distribution, this milestone provides an integrated pre-release version of the upcoming Samba 4.6 version, which will be available in UCS after finalization.

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.

Ansible Modules for the Automation of UCS-Specific Tasks

Ansible Logo

As a long-term Univention partner, we at Adfinis Sygroup operate UCS environments for many of our customers. We employ Ansible for automation when running different Linux distributions as it standardizes the roll-out of UCS among other things.

Up until now there weren’t any Ansible modules available for UCS-specific tasks. To remedy this, we developed modules based on the standard script interface of Univention Directory Manager for recurring tasks in the maintenance of the directory service with the goal of simplifying the process. These currently include the following:

udm_group
udm_user
udm_dns_zone
udm_dns_record
udm_share

These modules are included in the Ansible extra modules as of Ansible Version 2.2 and can be used accordingly with Ansible, as can other modules. If additional Ansible modules are developed in the future (and not yet included in Ansible itself), it will be possible to add them to individual projects. The following offers a brief explanation of how these additional Ansible modules can be installed and then provides a brief introduction to the modules listed above.

How can OpenLDAP with UCS be scaled to over 30 million objects?

Serverschränke mit Zahnrädern im Vordergrund

The majority of the environments in which UCS is employed include anywhere from a couple of dozen users up to several thousand – sizes which can be directly implemented with the standard configuration of UCS. In the systems operated by the education authorities we see a leap to between 10,000 and 100,000 users – in this case, the UCS@school concepts allow functioning scaling.

Even including groups, hosts, and other LDAP infrastructure objects in the calculations, these environments rarely exceed 200,000 objects. But what happens when an environment with more than 30,000,000 objects needs to be administrated in LDAP?

UCS 4.1-3: Third Point Release published

The third point release of Univention Corporate Server 4.1 – UCS 4.1-3 – is now available to download. It includes various usability improvements, important security updates and all errata updates that have been published in the last three months. One of the main focuses of this release is on the further extension of the App Center such as offering software vendors the possibility to provide Docker-based apps.

New Release of UCS@school Simplifies the Central Management of User Accounts

Logo UCS@School
With the release of UCS@school 4.1 R2, we have equipped our IT solution for schools with two new additional functions for the central management of digital identities and authorizations. From now on, UCS@school allows teaching staff and pupils to use their accounts at various schools. And stored school administration data can now be automatically imported into the identity management system of UCS. These new functions significantly reduce the maintenance efforts of managing the identities and authorizations of pupils and teaching staff. With these two new features we increased UCS@school’s standing as a solution for creative, centralized, and cost effective IT management of applications and digital identities in schools.

Samba in UCS for the Provision of Microsoft Windows Services

Univention Corporate Server Logo

Through the integration of the software Samba in Univention Corporate Server we provide you with Microsoft Windows Services.

In this video we like to explain you the basic concept behind the software Samba in UCS and present you two of the most widely used UCS extensions. These are the Microsoft Active Directory compatible domain controller and the Windows compatible member server.