2023-09-21: Shutdown of Omnibus on November 30th 2023

The long-standing "Omnibus" service, through which employees had the option of offering simple personal web pages, is being discontinued for good.

Since the end of the 1990s, the "Omnibus" service has been a web space linked to the data storage of the university account, in which publicly accessible data could be stored and made available as a "personal website". However, the service has been in declining use for many years. As early as 2016, the service was on the verge of being shut down, see https://www.rz.uni-freiburg.de/de/rz/aktuell/archiv-bis-2019/EoLomnibus.

At the beginning of 2023, the service was evaluated again and it was determined that the group of active users is now so small that we have decided to finally discontinue the service as of November 30, 2023, see also announcement of January 10, 2023. https://www.rz.uni-freiburg.de/en/rz-en/news-alerts/aktuell-en/10-01-2023-innovations-in-2023

All users who still have data on their personal area are currently being contacted by email and informed about the shutdown and possible alternatives:

Users who have previously managed content on the Omnibus server are asked to transfer the content to other systems in a timely manner. Depending on the use case, the following options are available:

Publicly accessible personal homepages and information pages on research projects can be conveniently managed with the content management system via the portal solution used at the institutes. The design of the web pages is automatically possible in the corporate design of the university without any knowledge of HTML. If your institute already uses an institute portal, contact your local portal administrator how and where you can integrate your content there or clarify with your faculty how to best present your content on the respective resources. The list of publications is best kept in the research database.
Teachers who have previously provided teaching materials on the Omnibus server for access by students should offer this in future via the ILIAS learning platform. The advantage of using the learning platform is the already existing personalized access for all students, which enables convenient access authorization to the teaching content, as well as the use of a central administration platform, which in turn also offers students the opportunity to bundle the teaching materials relevant to them in a uniform place.
Users who have used the Omnibus server as a test and practice environment for creating websites or simple web applications can have a complete Linux-based virtual machine assigned to them on the bwCloud and work very flexibly with self-administered (web) applications in it, see https://www.bw-cloud.org/en/first_steps.

Please ensure that your data is moved in good time if it is still needed. Data files on omnibus directories will be taken offline and temporarily archived on 11/30/2023 and deleted after 3 months.

If you have any questions, please contact webserveradmin@rz.uni-freiburg.de.

We kindly ask you to pay attention to the date announcement!

Your RZ team