Orange S.A., France’s largest telecommunications company with 170,000 employees, was faced with the challenge of managing the user identities of around 30 million mail accounts and handling several hundred thousand simultaneous accesses after the overhaul of its consumer email platform. Such a renewal became necessary as the previous system could no longer withstand the continuous growth of the platform and the software stack was no longer up to date.

Our solution, Univention Corporate Server (UCS) with integrated OpenLDAP, offers a scalable identity management system that remains stable even at high workloads thanks to an LDAP cluster.

The decision of the responsible Orange IT team favoured UCS, as it enabled the flexible mapping of roles and rights both at the level of delegative administration and for selective replication of the LDAP servers. However, the possibilities offered by UCS for a scalable notification system as well as the existing and expandable interfaces were also important, since UCS also had to harmonize with the existing system.

Following the start of the project in mid-2014, the first project release with full functionality could already be delivered in 2015. Over the course of 2016, the solution was expanded with additional functions and server roles and numerous performance tests were carried out to ensure that the system would withstand the expected extremely high workloads. At the end of the same year, the system went live with the full range of managed identities. Since then, mail accounts have been successively migrated to the new system. In addition, new requirements, such as stricter data protection regulations or new provisioning workflows, are continually being implemented.