UCS portal page

4.3. UCS portal page#

Portal pages offer a central view of all available services in a UCS domain. Requirements strongly differ from small to large environments in organizations, public authorities, or even schools. Therefore, UCS implemented a very flexible and individually customizable concept for portal pages.

Note

The Univention Portal is part of Univention Nubus. For more information about Nubus, refer to What is Univention Nubus?

As illustrated in Fig. 4.4, portal entries (i.e., links to applications/Apps/services; UDM object type portals/entry) can be assigned to none, one or multiple portal categories. A portal category (UDM object type portals/category) can be assigned to none, one or multiple portals. A portal itself (UDM object type portals/portal) renders all portal categories which are assigned to it.

In addition, you can create portal announcements (UDM object type portals/announcement) and use them to announce, for example, maintenance windows or service outages. They can have a severity level, such as information or warning, a start and end date and a visibility limitation to a specific group of users. A portal announcement shows up at the top of each portal on all portals.

The portal domain, shipped with every installation, is configured on each server by default. In addition to all installed applications of the domain, links to Univention Management Console as well as the server overview are shown on this portal page.

To change the displayed portal, adjust the Univention Configuration Registry Variable portal/default-dn and run the command univention-portal update.

Custom portals and portal entries can be defined and managed either via the UMC module Portal or directly on the portal site.

After logging in to the portal on the Primary Directory Node or Backup Directory Node, members of the Domain Admins group can edit the portal after clicking on the corresponding entry in the user menu. They now can create new entries on the portal, modify existing entries, modify the order or the design.

You can use the UMC module Portal for advanced settings such as adding portals and announcements or control through the group membership, which users can see which portal entries.

By default, all portal entries are displayed for everyone. In the UMC module Portal in the category Login, it can be configured whether anonymous visitors have to sign in before they can see entries. It is also possible to limit certain entries for certain groups. This requires the LDAP attribute memberOf. Nested group memberships (i.e., groups in groups) are evaluated.

You can make further design adjustments in the file /usr/share/univention-portal/css/custom.css. UCS doesn’t overwrite this file during an update.

Schema of the portal concept in UCS

Fig. 4.4 Schema of the portal concept in UCS: Portals can be independently defined and assigned to UCS systems as start site; a link entry can be displayed on multiple portals.#

4.3.1. Assign rights for portal settings#

The following describes how to make the UMC module Portal accessible to selected groups or users. This example assumes that a group Portal Admins has been created and members of this group are supposed to be given access to the portal settings.

On a Primary Directory Node an ACL file has to be created first, for example /opt/62my-portal-acl.acl. This file has to have the following content to allow the necessary ACL changes:

access to dn="cn=portals,cn=univention,@%@ldap/base@%@" attrs=children
  by group/univentionGroup/uniqueMember="cn=Portal Admins,cn=groups,@%@ldap/base@%@" write
  by * +0 break

access to dn.children="cn=portals,cn=univention,@%@ldap/base@%@" attrs=entry,@univentionObject,@univentionNewPortalEntry,
@univentionNewPortal,@univentionNewPortalCategory,children
  by group/univentionGroup/uniqueMember="cn=Portal Admins,cn=groups,@%@ldap/base@%@" write
  by * +0 break

Then execute the following command to create an LDAP object for the LDAP ACLs:

$ udm settings/ldapacl create \
  --position "cn=ldapacl,cn=univention,$(ucr get ldap/base)" \
  --set name=62my-portal-acl \
  --set filename=62my-portal-acl \
  --set data="$(bzip2 -c /opt/62my-portal-acl.acl | base64)" \
  --set package="62my-portal-acl" \
  --set ucsversionstart=4.4-0 \
  --set ucsversionend=5.99-0 \
  --set packageversion=1

If the ACL is to be deleted again, the following command can be used:

udm settings/ldapacl remove \
  --dn "cn=62my-portal-acl,cn=ldapacl,cn=univention,$(ucr get ldap/base)"

An appropriate UMC policy can now be created via UMC. The following UMC operations must be allowed within the policy:

  • udm-new-portal

  • udm-syntax

  • udm-validate

  • udm-license

How to create a policy is described in Creating a policy. Now the newly created policy only needs to be assigned to the wanted object, in this case the group Portal Admins. This can also be done directly within the UMC. For this example, navigate to the group module and edit the wanted group there. In the group settings, existing policies for the group object can be selected under Policies. More detailed information about policy assignment is described under Applying policies.