Univention Corporate Server Reviews

Functionality of the software to educate and learn oneself to improve skillset

Editable , customized features can be tricky

Univention Corporate Server is a very flexible but robust enterprise software. It runs very stable, scales with your needs, and is easily extensible by various apps. We are using it for almost 10 years now for ourselves as well as on dozens of customers, from single server instances to hosting clusters or backups on various locations with many servers.

Its versatility is also a "con": If you extended your UCS by apps from the appstore you are dependend from the app vendor.

Univention UCS is a very good solution for IT-Infrastructure Services. All used services are integrated in that way to easy manage heterogen structures, especially User- and Computer-Accounts as also basic it-services like DNS and DHCP The Management-UI is web-based, well-designed and with every version they fix failures quickly and developt the UI further.

The technology they try to manage is complex and full of features. With teh UCS-Registry they use a Configuration Database which is ease of use but not very well documented. Theres is no central document or tool which decribes all keys an possible values. Means, there are lot of keys, which you can create but there are only described in the relevant chapter in the documentation or support database etc.

Central Management of all features, even if multi server environments Included virtualisation plattform Included Windows ActiveDirectory support Included SAML2-Support Included Docker Support

The Systemd deamon may cause challenges after upgrades or power outages without UPS.

One of the great advantages in UCS is the UCS Domain concept (Master - Backup -Slave Server roles) where the LDAP and AD (Samba4) Domain is replicated from Master to Backup role servers and in fact of loosing the Master Server you are easily able to promote a Backup Role Server to the new Master Role Server. Also very impressive is the Management over the UCS WebFrontend - where you are able to administrate your whole Infrastructure (DHCP, DNS, SAMBA, LDAP, USERS, GROUPS, MACHINES,etc)

we are using UCS on 5 installations on 5 independent customers (from 5 to 50 Users) since about 3 years - and till today I can't tell any cons as there are nothing that did not work or made problems in the last 3 years

Complete solution for your SMB (directory service, DNS, DHCP, mailserver, fileserver and much much more. Easy to manage with very intuitive web interface.

Although the basic manual which comes with Univention is really good, some features should be documented better.

Robustness & reliability. Having used UCS for over 5 years in my own business I am now integrating it into my customers IT infrastructure. It is obvious from the rock solid stability of the platform it's the product of an organisation who employs the highest levels of stringent software development & engineering.

There is very little I don't like about UCS. Occasionally, the web management interface (UMC) will not accomplish some tasks & some command line admin is required. So from that perspective less technically inclined folk might find it lacking. But for anyone with basic linux admin skills it's a breeze to work with.