Digital Solutions at Bremerhaven Schools: Interview with Andreas Froberg

Mr. Froberg, how many users are you responsible for in total at the schools in Bremerhaven?

As a local education authority, we provide the IT services and IT infrastructure for almost 20,000 users all told. 18,000 of these are pupils and 1,700 are teaching staff and other employees in our 40 schools.

What digital solutions do you have in your portfolio for the schools right now?

As far as solutions for schools are concerned, Bremerhaven works in close cooperation with the education authority in Bremen and the State Institute for School (LIS). Your UCS and UCS@school solutions have already been in use in the city of Bremen for some time now. When we started thinking about introducing a learning management system in Bremerhaven four years ago, it was only natural to take a look at itslearning – the solution that Bremen had selected the year before. It quickly convinced us, and, like Bremen, we decided on a centralized, interschool concept. That’s why we operate UCS in the BIT computer center and maintain a digital identity with a username and password for each and every user in its directory service. Following the setting up of this directory service, we created a personal work e-mail address for all teaching staff and other employees at the schools. itslearning was also made available for all schools. It was initially employed at all the vocational training schools, for senior classes in the grammar schools, and at some high schools. Since its introduction, we have noticed that use of the solution by both staff and students has increased steadily. In addition, many of the staff in the elementary schools are also using itslearning for organizational purposes. The introduction of the itslearning Sofa Tutor tool, which allows teaching staff to create their own digital learning content, brought with it new impulses.

Interview with Malte Clemens: Digital Offers for Schools, City of Hannover

How many schools with how many students and teachers do you supervise?

99 schools, approx.47,000 students, approx. 5,000 teachers

Which digital offers are you already using? How do you deploy them?

The state capital of Hanover (LHH) supports the schools in their administrative tasks, such as the maintenance and software equipment of the school secretariats’ computers.
There has never been a comprehensive central IT offering for the classes. By this, a large number of individual solutions have emerged in schools in recent years. The hardware procurement was carried out by the LHH and for the support the schools received an IT budget.

Practical Use of the REST API Using the Example of EGroupware

The Univention Directory Manager (UDM) enables access to content in the LDAP directory service, for example viewing, editing, deleting, and moving of objects (users, groups, computers, printers, shares, etc.).
The UDM can be accessed and controlled via both the web interface and the command line. In UCS 4.4-2, a third option has now also been added: the REST API. This interface connects applications with the UCS directory service via HTTPS and supports the maintenance of the user properties or computer objects of the connected systems.
This article begins by explaining the technical background of the REST API and its implementation in UCS.
During the implementation of the REST API, an exciting exchange took place between Univention and the developers at EGroupware GmbH in Kaiserslautern, Germany. As a result, EGroupware became the first solution to employ the new interface in the Univention App Center. In the second section of the article, Ralf Becker from EGroupware explains the implementation of the new API and the advantages it offers providers of third-party applications.

Film Tutorial: UCS Admin Diary for Sysadmins

Every systemadministrator has this problem: When did I set up this one function or when did I change the password? To answer these questions we have developed a diary for sysadmins: UCS Admin Diary. The application provides a quick overview of all administrative events in a UCS domain. This includes software and app installations and updates, creating, changing and deleting users and other directory service objects, and password changes.

Interview with Dominik Fahrin, Special Service “Central Services and Data Processing”, City of Beckum

Logo Stadt Beckum
Mr. Fahrin, how many schools with how many students and teachers do you supervise?

In the city of Beckum we have a total of nine schools, six primary schools and three secondary schools. In addition, together with our neighboring town Ennigerloh, we also manage an intermunicipal comprehensive school. That means: around 4,500 pupils and around 650 teachers, although currently, we only manage the teachers with UCS@school.

Domain Replication Service (DRS) with Samba for Empowering Distributed Environments

In larger environments with thousands of users, you can often find multiple Domain Controller offering authentication and authorization services. For Windows-based endpoints, UCS utilizes Samba 4 to provide these services. In between the different Samba 4 servers, UCS uses the Domain Replication Service (DRS) to keep the server data synchronized. While Samba 4 does a superb job in replicating the data, there are some tweaks you can utilize to optimize the replication, to provide better performance in distributed environments. Let us have a look!

UCS 4.4-4: Fourth Point Release of UCS 4.4

We’ve just published the 4th point release of UCS 4.4: apart from bug fixes and some patches, we added some cool new features and improved numerous apps. For example, UCS 4.4-4 introduces logging of LDAP authentications, something that was previously only available via Samba 4. Our developers also put some work into the AD Connector (enhanced security, performance and compatibility), the Univention App Center and the UCS portal login screen. Read on to find out more about the most important innovations.

Provide Solutions for Home Office Team Collaboration

In recent days and weeks, many employees retreated to home office to break chains of infection, others plan or would like to do so. But not everyone has the tools to continue working productively and together with colleagues in as many areas as possible. Working remotely and the collaboration of several people from the home office place special demands on the way a team works and on the tools it uses.
As an open hyperintegration platform and with the Univention App Center, Univention Corporate Server (UCS) offers a whole range of different applications which enable effective and collaborative working from the home office. Among the more than 90 applications in the App Center are solutions for file sharing (Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile), for project management (OpenProject and the Kanban solution Wekan), video conference (Kopano Meet), real-time communication (Rocket.Chat) or knowledge transfer (MediaWiki Bluespice). All these solutions are also available as virtual appliances with a pre-configured UCS, which you can put into operation with a very manageable effort and make available to your colleagues for the home office.

UCS@school 4.4 v4 brings improved exam mode, computer room control and ID connector

The UCS@school team released the 4th version of the UCS@school app a few weeks ago. It is technically based on UCS 4.4 and brings some new functions as well as various adjustments and improvements.

In this article, I would like to give you a short overview about the most important new features for administrators and users, especially in the exam mode, computer room and laptop class control, single sign-on and printer control. Very interesting is the new ID-Connector, which enables data transfer between federal state directories, school district directories and school directories.