Microsoft Entra ID vs. Univention Corporate Server (UCS)

It is especially good for organizations that are otherwise in the Microsoft ecosystem (Microsoft 365 applications). Microsoft Entra ID is really well supported sign-in method in various SaaS-applications and they often have step-by-step guides how to deploy the SSO with Microsoft Entra ID. It's less suitable for organizations that might use other productivity tools than M365 or do not have Windows-based computers.

Incentivized

Univention Corporate Server is well suited:

1. If an Organization would like to use it as a complete Active Directory Server.
2. If an Organization wants to deploy other applications which are important like SSO, Mail Server, 2FA etc., as with one click all these Apps will be integrated magically thus reducing the Admin job considerably.
3. Web based management which will be quite useful for the Admins who are from Windows background only.
4. Univention as a company which has close to 2 decades of experience.

• Single Sign-on helps ease the user experience, allowing users to avoid typing multiple passwords.
• The identity and management are straightforward to use and easy to connect to other applications, as well as third-party applications.
• The support of remote work. Nowadays, many people work from home and need to access their accounts. Microsoft Enterprise ID gives secure access to the company data.

Incentivized

• Complete replacement for MS Active Directory Server.
• Univention App Center - awesome concept with which Apps can be installed for the Domain.
• App Center can be compared to Google Play Store or Apple Play Store - Organizations can gain tremendous advantages.
• Plethora of Apps which are both free and paid and excellent apps for the Organizations.

• Probably the most primary thing is just the interface itself. It's frequently changing and so oftentimes we kind of have to go back and redocument our processes for our IT staff because the steps that they would take to perform a task one month. Now it's a totally different staff, new dashboard, even a new name for the product or the feature. So it would be nice if that stuff was a little bit more consistent.

Incentivized

• As Univention is from Germany, lot of informative articles are in German but English articles are also good but less in number.

MSFT Entra ID has been essential for managing our geographically dispersed team. We're confident that it will scale with us as grow, and we'll be able to take advantage of additional security and ID management features as they become necessary. Being able to centrally manage our user access from anywhere with a small support team is such a relief.

Incentivized

I mean it's pretty good. It is click, click. I mean, oftentimes I can go to the expert or layer two support to get help. Suddenly I go to them. So it has to be pretty useful to be honest. I do a lot of, and there's a lot of, you could do research quickly online to find out how to do certain things. I think that's the only thing we can improve to in terms of kind of a best practice path is setting up it. But because I'm it profess of tons of years in co-management services, I can figure it out. But for others they may not be able to figure it out. You still need an IT person of course to translate all of that. But to me pretty straightforward. I come from the days of directory from 2008, 2000, Microsoft server 2000.

Incentivized

There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe

Incentivized

I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.

Incentivized

I have not needed to engage support for anything at this time. I have been able to find the answers either online or in a knowledgebase. I tried to skip the question but it would not let me, so I rated a 9 based on other interactions with Microsoft support I have had

Incentivized

Most training was internally produced

Incentivized

Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.

Incentivized

We've used other Microsoft products and we've also used some standalone products, like each application you can have its own identity, so we've looked at some of those too, but we try to use the Entra ID as much as possible because it offers a wider range of reliability.

Incentivized

We have evaluated Zentyal and ClearOS but we found out that UCS is more suited to every Organization.

The features are getting addresses per requirements and their value for Money. The proposed ROI and actual ROI build confidence.

Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.

Incentivized

Microsoft Professional Services' technical knowledge is appreciable as consultants design the solution as per customer requirements. Mapping of features per user specifications and assisting Customer IT engineers to implement so they can manage and administer the services.

• I think it's had positive. It's enabled us to make authentication easier and more streamlined across the organization from frontline workers to back office workers.
• It's allowed us to really adopt authentication policies and methods that suit that user and their work environment.

Incentivized

• As a partner, we have gained lot of respect from our customers as UCS is rock solid.
• UCS is truly Open Source.
• UCS has surpassed our expectations.