You don’t really like the new color style? No problem: UCS 5 supports themes. All our web interfaces (portal, Univention Management Console, Self Service, Login) can be redesigned with custom CSS stylesheets to change colours and fonts or integrate your own brand.

The portal is always the fist point of contact. Therefore, the new UCS version integrates the Univention Management Console (UMC) for central administration of domains, services, user accounts, and other resources. All UMC modules are available directly in the UCS 5 portal. To help admins stay on top of things, the portal can now group several tiles ­– similar to smartphone or tablet interfaces.

While working on UCS 5, we decided to migrate the portal to the JavaScript framework Vue.js which improves the look & feel and makes everything much more accessible. After the release, we want to successively convert the other UCS web interfaces and expand the portal’s functionality.

Enhanced Univention App Center

The App Center also benefits from the new user interface design, it’s now more clearly structured. We’ve also added some new features. For example, we have significantly improved the App Center’s handling of dependencies between individual apps. If an app needs other components, it is no longer necessary to resolve the dependencies in advance and install multiple apps one after the other. Instead, the installation of all required apps now happens in one step.

Admins can now directly select multiple apps in the frontend to install, update or uninstall them in one go. The App Center collects all necessary information and potential questions about your configuration in advance before (un)installing or updating the apps.

New Core: Debian “Buster” and Python 3

UCS 5.0 is based on the current stable Debian release (10.9) and includes all its packages. We have also restructured our own repositories. Previously, we organised them hierarchically, by UCS release, so we had a separate repo for each patch level release, which led to a somewhat confusing situation. Also, this structure was time-consuming to maintain, because some repositories contained the same package versions, sometimes different versions. In future, we will put all software packages in one repository and maintain a separate packages file with a list of available packages for each release. This not only saves space on the download servers, but also simplifies the processes and speeds up the installation via the package manager as well as the App Center.

The migration from Python 2 to 3 has been completed for all core components. During this process, we adjusted many libraries and other tools. The interfaces for integrating applications have also been migrated to Python 3, which should help developers of third-party apps. Admins running both, UCS 4.x and 5.0, in their environment can roll out Python-based extensions (such as hooks to Extended Attributes of Univention Directory Manager) for both Python versions.

Staying Focused: Fewer Features, But Good Ones!

As I wrote in my blog post blogpost UCS 5.0 – Focus instead of feature overkill at the end of last year, it was time to clean up a bit and say goodbye to some applications and projects. It was simply too much work to maintain their integration with the UCS core components – especially during upgrades. By removing features which are rarely or never used, we can now focus on our strengths, including the portal, the Univention App Center and Samba 4.