The free and open source file hosting solution Nextcloud is available in the Univention App Center either preconfigured or as a virtual appliance and is therefore quickly installed and set up on UCS. Nextcloud can also offer it‘s services on a central server in large, distributed environments and is therefore ideal for integrating network shares from other computers.
The district of Harz as a school authority recognized early, that a school has different needs than the public administration. Therefore the school IT is separated from the IT structure of the administrative district. Our structures enable us to remain flexible and to respond to the individual needs of the schools. A special school needs other applications and end devices than a grammar school. Nevertheless, both systems must be manageable and functional.
The Maintenance for the Core Edition version of UCS 4.3 has expired. Users using the Core Edition of UCS 4.3 should update to a more recent version of UCS to further receive security updates, bug fixes and minor releases.
Information about the new features of UCS 4.4 can be found in our blog article UCS 4.4 Release – Admin Diary, Self Services and Windows Domain Trusts.
A description of the steps necessary for the update can be found in the blog article How To: Upgrade to new UCS version 4.4.
Customers with a valid subscription contract for UCS are not affected and will receive updates until the end of March 2020 at least. More information about the Maintenance Cycle for UCS can be found in our Wiki article Maintenance Cycle for UCS.
We are pleased to announce a prominent addition to our App Center. Since the beginning of October the German dropbox alternative Seafile, the practical Kanban board of Trello competitor Wekan and the German Zendesk competitor Zammad are available in the App Center. This adds three popular and practical business applications to our Univention Corporate Server (UCS) offering, which you can add to your company’s IT by a simple click.
Anyone operating IT services for companies or organisations will sooner or later be confronted with this: everything is growing, you need more space for data and virtual machines, at the same time the demands for the availability of services are increasing and the hardware servers also need to be maintained.
Classic solutions for available storage such as NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network) systems are often expensive and just as often proprietary – and therefore not necessarily the basis you want to build your own IT infrastructure on as part of an open source strategy.
It’s been almost 5 years since we released UCS 4.0. During this time, UCS has evolved a lot. At the same time, we’ve continued to maintain the old version’s features. While most of them are popular with our users, others are not. There are also some things we would do differently if we had to do them again. By jumping to the next major version, we would like to get rid of some relics and implement several new features at the same time. We’re still at the very beginning, so not all decisions are final yet – but true to the motto “be open” I would like to share some of our ideas and plans in this blog post.
Looking back at the first point release (UCS 4.4-1 in June 2019), our REST API for the Univention Directory Manager was still in beta stadium. Good news: the interface for accessing the directory service is stable now. The API connects applications to the UCS directory service; access is granted via a web service using HTTPS, and data is exchanged JSON format. So, the REST API offers the same functionality as the udm command line tool.
For example, it simplifies the maintenance of user properties or computer objects from connected systems. Developers of applications offered in the Univention App Center also benefit from the new, standardized access because they are no longer limited to the UDM Python interface. The REST API of the Univention Directory Manager is by default activated on all UCS 4.4-2 DC Master and DC Backup instances.