Introduction¶

This chapter focuses on the services offered by Zentyal as an office server, in particular, its ability to centrally manage network users. This chapter also covers file sharing, integration with Microsoft Active Directory® - either as an additional domain controller or “Operations Master” and configuration of SSO (Single sign-on) authentication on different services. In addition, Antivirus module will also be explained to help you to provide an additional layer of security for your system and some specific modules.

Directory services allow you to manage the user-related information across your organization, centralizing and abstracting the authorization and permission handling for all the other services. This allows your users to authenticate securely on the network. Likewise, you can define a hierarchical structure with access controls to the organization’s resources. Integration with Samba and Kerberos technologies turn Zentyal into a native drop-in replacement for Windows Server® in the SMBs, giving you the option to work with mixed environments (Zentyal and Windows® servers) or in stand-alone mode, serving Windows® clients.

File sharing with the option of applying access control policies for users and groups, is one of the most important features of an office server and greatly eases cooperative work on documents in an intuitive way. On the other hand, security policies allow the protection of critical files within an organization.

The antivirus software will allow you to scan several paths to detect possible malware. In addition, thanks to the ‘on-access‘ antivirus feature integrated in Zentyal, all files uploaded to specified locations can be analyzed in real time - This is especially useful if you have configured shared folders.