Release 4.1-4 Supports French and Includes Latest Samba Software

UCS Release 4.1-4 Logo

With UCS 4.1-4 we released the fourth patchlevel release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS). According to UCS wide-spread use on a global scale, the installation wizard and the UCS management system now also support the French language.

Screenshot UCS französisch

On a technical scale, we focused on the improvement of UCS’ robustness, speed, and performance, particularly in large and heterogeneous environments. This focus is attributed to the fact that UCS has been increasingly used for managing identities and rights of large organizations with tens of thousands of users.

Brief Introduction: Docker

beladenes Containerschiff
Docker has been one of the buzzwords in recent years. Containers in itself are nothing new in the Linux world, and anyone using a shared web space is almost certainly using some container implementation. Docker, however, provides management interfaces and isolation mechanisms that make Docker containers more attractive to use in enterprise environments than any prior container implementation.

A good enough reason to have a closer look at Docker.

Digital Opportunities in Education Simply Too Good to Waste

Tafel mit Aufschrift "What's Next"

What is the current situation?

Compared with other developed countries, Germany’s pupils, teachers, and curricula are lagging far behind in terms of digital education and media skills. The German Minister for Education, Johanna Wanka, has identified two principal reasons for this, which will now be addressed in the new DigitalPakt#D strategy. One the one hand she sees a lack of pedagogic concepts and strategies, and on the other an underdeveloped IT infrastructure. I can agree wholeheartedly with this assessment for many sectors.

Cool Solutions – Redmine: project management

Redmine Logo

What are Cool Solutions?

At Univention we define Cool Solutions as solutions which expand UCSs with expedient and useful functions and which are deployed successfully by our customers. We regularly present these solutions in Wiki as Cool Solutions articles.

The Univention blog is a collection of the most popular Cool Solutions. Today, we will be looking at Redmine, a free project management software which we have been using in professional services for many years for internal administration and to coordinate customer projects.

Release of UCS 4.2 planned for April 2017

After having released a new version of UCS with new features each November for the last few years, we have decided this year to reschedule the release of UCS 4.2 for April 2017.

There are a number of reasons for this move, one of the primary ones being the migration of apps from the App Center to the use of the container technology Docker. This results in increased security during operation and the possibility of running apps with different system requirements on one and the same system. In addition, this will also allow us to render the updating of UCS itself and the individual apps more independent of each other, thus significantly reducing the efforts required on the part of app developers and users in the case of new releases.

UCC 3.0 Now Verified as Citrix Ready

A new major version of Univention Corporate Client (UCC), Version 3.0, was released in mid-August. Due to a problem with Citrix Receiver, however, Citrix was not fully supported in that version. Thanks to an update, it has now proved possible to resolve the issue, and complete Citrix support with UCS is now guaranteed once again.

The last release brought with it a changeover of the operating system basis from UCC 3.0 to Ubuntu 16.04 Long Term Support (LTS). The Ubuntu substructure allows users of UCC to benefit both from the large, continuously updated software selection and from the broad hardware support offered by Ubuntu’s use of the latest Linux kernel versions.

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.

Cool Solution Moodle – For Cooperative Learning

Moodle Logo

What are “Cool Solutions”?

Cool Solutions is the name we use to describe Univention solutions which expand UCS with practical, advantageous functions and which we successfully employ for our customers. These solutions are regularly showcased in the Univention Wiki in the form of Cool Solutions articles.

In this article I would like to introduce the learning platform Moodle and its interface with UCS. At the end of this article you can also find an interview we conducted with the Chemnitz education authorities, which are currently implementing Moodle in a number of the city’s schools.

How to Integrate with LDAP: “Generic LDAP Connection”

LDAP

In the blog article series “How to integrate with LDAP”, we introduce a whole range of different options and possibilities for how the LDAP provided by UCS can be expanded or used in cooperation with other services.

In the first section of this article, “Typical Configuration Options”, I will be using an example to demonstrate the sort of information typically required to perform user authentication against the UCS LDAP. I will be taking you through the necessary configuration steps using the project management system Redmine as an example, as this requests all the typical information.

In the second section, “Types of Search Users”, I will go into more detail on the possibilities available to you if it is not possible to search through the UCS LDAP anonymously.

If you are not all that familiar with the topic of LDAP yet, I would recommend you read our blog article: Brief Introduction: What’s Behind the Terms LDAP and OpenLDAP? first of all.

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