Due to the upcoming festivities we take a creative break until the end of the year.
We wish all our readers a wonderful Christmas party, a nice rest and a successful, happy new year.
See you in 2018,
Your Univention team!
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.
With version 17.1, EGroupware has been extended from the classic groupware with an integrated CRM system to include a file server with Collabora Online Office. The complete package can be easily installed via the Univention App Center. In addition, the browser-based EGroupware does not require an Office suite to be installed on the client.
We here at bitpack.io accompanied the project from start to finish and would like to present it to you today.
The LDAP server in UCS, like the Active Directory on a Windows server, stores all the information on your domain about all your resources from hardware to employee as objects, namely in a structured and well-defined manner. Every object has some defined attributes of a particular type. Common attributes of a user object are, for example, the user’s surname, password and further valuable information on him. Part of the LDAP is the LDAP schema, which provides the administrator with a clear overview on all objects by describing which types of attributes exist within the LDAP and what attributes they have.
So, if you want to include additional attributes or create entirely new object types, extending the schema might be the way to go.
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.