Since the announcement last week of ownCloud Enterprise Edition 5, I’ve been getting a lot of requests to dive a bit deeper into the new features. I’d like to start with one that our customers asked for a lot, one that is only possible with a self-hosted solution, and one that epitomizes ownCloud’s integration approach — our Provisioning API.
Add and manipulate users: IT can now use existing automation tools to connect to ownCloud and perform a variety of user related activities. For example, users can be added to ownCloud, quotas can be set and queried, and admins can get a list of enabled apps on the server. In addition, IT admins can set and get keys for at rest encryption, all through the authenticated provisioning API. This allows ownCloud to fold into existing management processes, and allows IT to better leverage past investments with their on-site file sync and share solution.
There’s no need to create another stack, or buy new tools, or create new processes – or worse yet, bypass processes in the cloud. With the new Provisioning API, IT controls what users can share what files and with whom, and to easily manage and report on data access. The Provisioning API seamlessly links ownCloud to any tool or application that can make web services calls to provisioning users, such as that custom user provisioning set that you created a few years ago. You already have it, it works, you might as well leverage it with ownCloud!
