The most striking new feature of the Univention Corporate Server 4.2 release is the significantly further developed operating concept for all users – not only for the administrators, but also for the end users. In addition to new features such as the online portal, this is due to the smoother interface, faster ways to overview deployed resources and improvements in the management system.
In the past months, our development department has worked intensively on bringing all the important UCS components to the latest state-of-the-art.
Individually Configurable Online Portal for Administrators and Users
UCS’s easy-to-use operability is mainly enhanced by a completely new designed online portal that gives all users quick access to their respective domain, its resources, and also to the installed web services in a UCS environment. This portal page is individually configurable: You can not only change the design to your taste, but also determine which web services are displayed to which user. This is an important feature particularly in larger, heterogeneous environments.
Technical Updates for Debian, Samba, the Linux Kernel and Docker
But we also did a lot of work under the hood: In addition to changing to Debian 8 (Jessie), which allows us to provide security updates even faster, there was also an update to the current Samba version 4.6, a switch of the Linux kernel to version 4.9 and thus to the most current Long Term Support version. This ensures that UCS supports important security requirements and is optimized for current hardware requirements.
Dockerization of the Univention App Center
The “Dockerization” of the Univention App Center has also made an important step forward with the current release. We not only updated UCS to the Docker version 1.12., but also provided further apps based on Docker. In combination with the App Provider Portal, which allows software developers to easily and extensively transfer their solutions to the Univention App Center independently of us, we continue to make it easier for providers of software and cloud services to complement our fast-growing platform with their solutions.
The Technical Highlights at a Glance:
- Change of the Debian base from Debian 7 (Wheezy) to Debian 8 (Jessie) and related to that we changed the boot system to “systemd” as default setting.
- Quick overview of all servers active in the UCS domain.
- Use of SAML as a web single sign-on for the management system, provided the corresponding configuration exists and the name resolution is given.
- Improvement of the usability and user guidance of the password self sevice.
- Update to the current Samba version 4.6, which in addition to numerous detail improvements leads in particular to a much better performance of the Active Directory functions such as the interaction of printer drivers with clients of the Windows 10 operating system.
- Switch of the Linux kernel 4.1 to 4.9 and thus to the latest version with Long Term Support (LTS).
- Update to Docker version 1.12.
- Update of the virtualization components QEMU / KVM from version 1.1 to version 2.8.
- Extension of the Univention Directory Listener to include the internal use of LMBD, which has been successfully used for OpenLDAP since UCS 4.0.
An overview of all release highlights can be found in our Bugzilla.
Further information on UCS 4.2 can also be found in our blog articles about the Release Candidate of UCS 4.2 and about the first milestone of UCS 4.2 by Stefan Gohmann, Head of our development and support team.
