Rocket.Chat: Open Source, Data Privacy-Minded, and Loving It

Communication is key for every organization no matter the field or industry. If a team can’t easily and effectively share ideas and updates with each other, then they are more likely to miss deadlines and deliver a sub-par product. Broadband internet speeds have made real-time communication a reality, but it can be a challenge to sift all of the solutions on the market.

Rocket.Chat has positioned itself as a full-featured messaging platform with one big difference that separates it from the competition: it is a completely open-source product. Potential customers will appreciate that because they have the freedom to control their deployment of Rocket.Chat server and direct access to the latest source code. However, open-source projects also come with a number of other key advantages.
Rocket.Chat is doing things with security and privacy that your typical messenger either ignores or fails to implement. It’s also introducing its users to a virtuous loop, where users can become contributors in improving the system itself, which is another rare feature of a messaging app.

And Rocket.Chat is available as app in Univention App Center and already utilizes Rocket.Chat’s LDAP support to enable users within the Univention Corporate Server (UCS) identity management to login to Rocket.Chat. A pre-installed App Appliance for VMware, VirtualBox and KVM is available for download to get prospects up and running quickly and easily.

In this article, we’ll explore the history of how Rocket.Chat came to be and what lies ahead for its open-source community of developers and users.

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.

Email Service, Learning Platform and Unified User Identities – Bremerhaven Digitizes School IT

As a media center in Bremerhaven, we support a total of about 40 schools, 1,700 teachers and 17,000 pupils in the use of IT and other media. When we began implementing our digitization strategy in early 2015, the introduction of a learning management solution was at the top of our list of priorities. But even then, we were already considering offering further services, such as a service e-mail address for teachers. At that time, however, there was still no standardized database in which the data of all pupils and teachers was available to which a learning management solution or a e-mail server could be connected.

Access your Desktop remotely with Guacamole

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If you’re looking for a way to maintain your computers remotely, maybe Guacamole is the answer. The remote desktop gateway offers easy access to your systems – any time and from any location. All you need is a web browser: Guacamole is a HTML5 web application. Not long ago we’ve included the program in the Univention App Center, so your remote desktop solution for UCS is only a few clicks away. This article explains how to install, configure and use Guacamole.

How-To: Single Sign-On for Nextcloud

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Log in once and automatically gain access to all programs and services – Single Sign-On (SSO) is a proven tool against the ever-increasing password fatigue among users. This is why many companies and educational institutions make it possible for users to log on centrally and only once.
It is also easy to set up Single Sign-On with UCS (see links at the end of this article). In this article I would like to show you how to link Nextcloud to UCS’s SSO mechanism.

Backup your Windows PCs: Bareos in the Univention App Center | Part 2

In February this year, we published a blog post on how to install the Bareos app via the Univention App Center. We explained how to modify the setup by adjusting some UCR variables and how to configure Windows or Linux computers from the UCS domain as Bareos clients. In this second part, we will explain in more detail how to back up a Windows client and how to configure backup jobs and schedules Bareos.