First for those who do not know it yet: since start of February I am happily working for the free software (open source) project ownCloud. My main tasks are to integrate ownCloud into other products, for example into the Univention Corporate Server (short UCS). As the ownCloud project will stay under the AGPL, there will be no secret code behind. The basic integration consists of creating a UCS package which nicely installs into the server and does auto-configuration and joining the environment. The goal: after installing ownCloud via package management it is instantly available for the users. That means, the setup procedure runs automatically and the LDAP module will be configured, so that users may login directly after installation.

Utilizing LDAP and Management Console

To take advantage of the capabilities of UCS with their LDAP backbone and registry, it will be possible to manage attributes via LDAP. In order to do so we registered our own PEN at the IANA. Thus we are able to define our own scheme and configure e.g. ownCloud specific user settings using this backend. With the capsulation into our own scheme the utilization of LDAP is not bound to UCS. In the next steps, we are going to make reasonable parts of ownCloud being configurable from the Univention Management Console, the web administration interface of UCS. Basically, we aim to enable you to administer ownCloud from the web interface, without logging into it as „local“ admin. Since the development is being done in the public, the package code is available in our „integration“-repository on Gitorious. To build the package, you need to copy the recent ownCloud source files into the package folder. A simple „dpkg-buildpackage“ should do the trick, given you have sufficient UCS packaging tools installed.

Demo at CeBIT

I hope that we can see already a very good amount of it at the CeBIT, 6th to 10th March in Hannover, Germany. If you are there, come by at our booth at Univenation in Hall 2, booth D48!