We have just published the seventh point release: UCS 4.4-7 comes with various improvements and some new features, for example in the Self Service app and in the portal. We have also added a new Samba version and worked on the S4 Connector. In this article, I’d like to describe the most important changes.

UCS Self Service, Single Sign-on via SAML

A great advantage of Univention Corporate Server is that users can use their credentials to log into completely different computers and also have access to all services in the UCS domain. With the initial 4.4 release, we introduced the new app Self Service, which allows users to make changes to their personal data; they don’t need admin rights in order to make these changes. This includes changing and resetting the password as well as editing the contact information.

The new UCS version 4.4-7 also supports this feature when a user is logged in via SAML using single sign-on (SSO). While we were at it, we added some extra security – after all, SSO is a central service that allows access to all authorized programs and services. Users with an expired password who enter an incorrect password in the password change dialog used to receive a corresponding message. This allowed unauthorized persons to find out whether a password for a particular account had expired. With UCS 4.4-7, this is no longer possible. In addition, certain files created by the listener on the server now receive correct file permissions. This way they’re available for the SAML service, but not for other users.

Cookie Banner for the UCS Portal

Cookies may only be stored on users’ computers if they have explicitly agreed to it – the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled this last year. It is therefore no longer sufficient to simply inform the visitors of a website about the usage of cookies. Since the portal and the management console of Univention Corporate Server also use cookies, we have now introduced a banner that requests the consent of the users.