After the last charts for 3rd party apps in the App Center we published beginnning of October, it’s now time for a short update.
Current members of the Top Ten Third Party Apps of the Univention App Center are:
The Univention Portal is the central hub via which users access a Univention system. It is where you can find links to installed applications like webmail. In addition, administrators also have the option of including their own links to external websites. Last, but by no means least, there is also a module here with which users can change their own password.
Univention supports personalization of the portal’s start page – in the best-case scenario, this not only ensures compliance with your corporate identity, but also allows users to identify better with Univention. For example, it is possible to place a number of different applications on the start page, permitting users direct access to them. Yet another option is even more evident immediately: In just a few steps, the portal can be customized with a large-scale background image and a portal logo. Domain administrators can perform this step quickly and with minimal effort.
We here at bitpack.io accompanied the project from start to finish and would like to present it to you today.
If you need to use various services online, which is by the way the norm, there’s nothing more conventient than using single sign-on (SSO). SSO allows you to log in to all available services in a domain with one password only. UCS provides this feature via the SAML Identity Provider since UCS 4.1.
We chose to implement SAML as the first single sign-on technology in UCS, because of its popularity in the enterprise sector, the high degree of security, and the positive experiences that we ourselves had made with SAML in the years before. Since then, a lot of services and Univention Apps already provide a SAML service provider. Now, we are working on integrating these into the UCS Identity Provider.
The Univention App Center makes it easy to install and set up a sophisticated collaboration solution on a stable basis. Univention Corporate Server (UCS) offers this basis – also for the integration with other open source solutions. EGroupware was created in 2003 and is thus one of the early collaboration solutions in the open source spectrum. For this reason, the product does not use proprietary formats at any point, but only open standards. At the same time, EGroupware uses other open source products as a basis, such as the LDAP directory service, Samba‘s file and print services and the MariaDB database. The open, cooperative approach to software development facilitates the integration of the groupware with UCS and other open source solutions.
The cumulative outages of the Amazon Web Services and the attacks on the global DNS network have shown that even large and supposedly professionally protected networks are endangered, too. These incidents also make us aware of the need to distribute critical infrastructures across multiple cloud providers. This distribution is particularly important for centralized authentication services, which provide users and permissions for various services and organizational offices. An outage of a single server system would be a catastrophe for services like AWS where thousands of users and their permissions would be affected simultaneously. This is why I would like to explain to you how you can safeguard your network against outages and criminal attacks. Even if the dimension of your network probably is not comparable to the one of AWS or the DNS network.
Thousands of organizations around the world use Univention Corporate Server every day. And the number increases week after week. The reason among others is that the Univention App Center contains, in addition to many UCS modules and extensions, dozens of professional enterprise applications from various vendors which can be easily integrated and maintained via the App Center. Therefore we are monitoring very closely which of these apps are really used and to which extent. Today, I would like to share some of the insights with you.
In the following article, we first explain briefly what a domain is and then describe the tasks of a domain controller. Finally, we become practical and see how the concept of “domain/domain controllers” has been implemented in Univention Corporate Server.
One of the highlights of the second point release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) are the significant enhancements UCS 4.2-2 offers for managing services and apps that are hosted in public cloud services such as the Amazon Marketplace. Services installed on UCS can now be accessed directly without any further configuration effort. Our development department has extended access to these services via the UCS Portal by converting the links to relative links. For portal entries for which there are several links, heuristic procedures determine the best link.
