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.

The usability for users and administrators of UCS has been further developed. This makes it possible to easily duplicate users and groups, thus significantly reducing administrative effort. Understandable error messages, warnings against potential sources of error or their complete elimination help users to ensure trouble-free operation of UCS. But not only the “feel”, but also the “look” of the UCS Management Console has been further developed, such as the notification dialogs or the display of deactivated input fields.

The release also offers attractive new possibilities for the manufacturers of the apps in the Univention App Center. For UCS 4.2-2, they can automate the creation of operational virtual appliances for their apps. Via the App Provider Portal they can also equip these appliances with their individual corporate design, providing users with an even more familiar experience. In addition, the appliances offer the perfect opportunity to quickly test and get to know an application on the manufacturers’ websites.

The newly added “App Settings” feature also ensures that users can easily configure an app for their IT infrastructure. The input of the basic configurations can be queried via forms already during the installation of the respective app. These queries are created by the app provider, who does not require any programming knowledge.

But of course, our development department has also attached great importance to high security during the operation of UCS. With this release, all security updates such as e. g. for OpenLDAP, Samba, MySQL or PostgreSQL are collectively published with UCS 4.2-2. With version 4.9.33, UCS 4.2-2 also has an updated Linux kernel, which provides important security and stability updates. The higher initialization speed of the Univention App Center has also further improved the performance of UCS.

An overview of further innovations:

No more dependency on LaTeX in the reporting function of the management system.

Warning for too long user names for Windows clients.

SSLv3 disabled by default in Univention Management Console. Encryption methods can now be configured via Univention Configuration Registry.

Possibility to install, even if the DNS server is not available.

Error reporting when a UCS system fails to join an Active Directory domain.

Protection against overwriting existing settings when provisioning Samba on a DC Master or DC Backup.

Management of virtual machines using custom tabs in the Univention Management Console (UMC).

For further information and an overview of all new features, please refer to our release notes.

Release Notes UCS 4.2-2