I often find myself speaking with ownCloud Enterprise Edition customers, and when I do – I find they almost always use the Active Directory (AD) / LDAP integration. Unfortunately, working with corporate directories is not easy – for a lot of reasons. Most often, the AD admin is not the same person as the ownCloud admin, so just getting the accounts properly configured is difficult. And then figuring out the right DN, user filters, login filters, and group filters – not to mention all the more complex attributes and filters – is not the easiest thing in the world, and it makes ownCloud setup more difficult. Or it did, until now.
When planning ownCloud 6, we decided to make the whole LDAP/AD setup easier – and we created the LDAP/AD configuration wizard. This wizard takes the basic owncloud account credentials and provides a smart mechanism for configuring filters, displaying the results of the filters and then automatically creating the query based on your GUI selections. Now you only need 3 settings to integrate ownCloud with LDAP or AD! Of course you can always configure it with more options – we did not remove the detailed configuration capabiliites – we just made it easier on ownCloud adminstrators. So, to all of you – thanks for the input, and why not give the new interface a try in ownCloud 6? The Community Edition release is just around the corner (Beta available now). You can also read more about the wizard here.
The Community Edition is a great way to try some of the new features before we release the Enterprise Edition in early 2014.
