Item: Univention Corporate Server (UCS)
Rating: 9
Author: Ravi Kumar Tenneti

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are an End to End IT Infrastructure Solutions company from India and we have been using Univention Corporate Server internally and also implemented to at least 6 more companies in the last 6 years (We are the partners of Univention for the last 6 years).

We have implemented both Free & Subscription based offerings of Univention. Some of the big implementations include for a very big Indian MNC, who is BSE Listed IT Distributor for 1650+ users spread across 11 Cities in India.

For this Organization, we have implemented UCS as Identity Access Management solution (if we can say - Linux based Active Directory Server) and also integrated SSO of Univention with their SAP, LinkedIn, Mail Server and VPN with 2FA.

For another customer, we have implemented as primary Domain Controller (this customer has not used Linux before) and their Windows Admin who is not comfortable with Linux, is also managing it as an Active Directory Server using RSAT without a single support call to us for the past 3 years.

The first installation that we have done was in the year 2015 and this Organization is using UCS as an Active Directory Server.

For another customer, we have implemented UCS is a giant in Biotechnology and involved in COVID Vaccine. For this customer, we have implemented UCS to integrate 4 different LDAPs to UCS and UCS as their Primary Authentication.

We are happy with Univention and hope to continue our relationship with them.

Pros and Cons

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.

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

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

ClearOS

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

Key Insights

Do you think Univention Corporate Server (UCS) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Univention Corporate Server (UCS)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Univention Corporate Server (UCS) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Univention Corporate Server (UCS) again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Univention Corporate Server is well suited:

If an Organization would like to use it as a complete Active Directory Server.
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.
Web based management which will be quite useful for the Admins who are from Windows background only.
Univention as a company which has close to 2 decades of experience.

Univention Corporate Server - Great Product which delivers what it is advertising

Overall Satisfaction with Univention Corporate Server (UCS)