In the past months, our development department has worked intensively on bringing all the important UCS components to the latest state-of-the-art.
Today, we have published the Release Candidate UCS 4.2. Highlight of the release is the new, freely configurable online portal, which you can flexibly adapt to your needs and the one of your organization. Further, a lot less obvious changes we have made are: We have updated the distribution base of UCS to Debian 8 (Jessie) and we have now made natively available a large part of the Debian packages. Hence, we can provide important security and product updates much faster than ever before.
We will release UCS 4.2 beginning of April 2017. Everyone who is curious to know more about UCS 4.2 can see a live demonstration of the Release Candidate at the CeBIT in hall 3 / booth D36-620 till Friday this week.
In our example, we will specifically refer to the interaction between Samba in UCS and Microsoft Windows, explaining in detail how a so-called trust relationship can be configured and informing about the current state of implementation.
We are very pleased to present the first milestone of Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.2. The milestone is for our system house and technology partners, app providers and interested parties, who want to take a first look at the upcoming release of UCS.
This milestone provides a preview of the new UCS portal, which makes it easy for end users to find installed apps in the UCS domain.
In addition to the updated Debian base distribution, this milestone provides an integrated pre-release version of the upcoming Samba 4.6 version, which will be available in UCS after finalization.
As I can imagine that this is a topic which will also be of interest to some of you too, I decided to summarize the most important findings of my work here:
The App Center is already home to more than 90 different apps developed for use in business IT, including groupware, ERP, CRM, and back-up solutions as well as solutions for a wide range of other application scenarios. Over 50 of these solutions are third-party apps from other developers and providers. For them, the App Center is the perfect channel for introducing their software to new user groups simply and easily. After all, as use of the free Core Edition of UCS and UCS as a subscription model with support and manufacturer’s warranty continues to become more and more widespread, the apps are readily available to an ever large number of organizations and private users.
Find more infomation on the App Center and all available appliances at App Catalog.
In the following video we introduce you to the Univention App Catalog and the pre-configured UCS appliances in particular. These appliances allow you to easily test many of the over 90 applications from the App Center.
With UCS 4.1-4 we released the fourth patchlevel release of Univention Corporate Server (UCS). According to UCS wide-spread use on a global scale, the installation wizard and the UCS management system now also support the French language.
On a technical scale, we focused on the improvement of UCS’ robustness, speed, and performance, particularly in large and heterogeneous environments. This focus is attributed to the fact that UCS has been increasingly used for managing identities and rights of large organizations with tens of thousands of users.
A good enough reason to have a closer look at Docker.
After having released a new version of UCS with new features each November for the last few years, we have decided this year to reschedule the release of UCS 4.2 for April 2017.
There are a number of reasons for this move, one of the primary ones being the migration of apps from the App Center to the use of the container technology Docker. This results in increased security during operation and the possibility of running apps with different system requirements on one and the same system. In addition, this will also allow us to render the updating of UCS itself and the individual apps more independent of each other, thus significantly reducing the efforts required on the part of app developers and users in the case of new releases.
