Summary:
Univention provided “UCS App Appliances” for UCS 4.x and 5.0, which will not be maintained and provided anymore for UCS 5.2. This is only a change in the available installation methods and has no effect on existing installations.
More detailed:
An “UCS App Appliance” is the combination of UCS and one or several Apps from the UCS App Center in a virtual machine image. The idea of these Appliances is to shorten and simplify the setup process, as administrators need to download only one virtual machine image which contains all needed software.
We started these appliances about 10 years ago and for some time they gained a lot attraction, mainly because they were advertised as the easiest way to install their solutions by both ownCloud and Nextcloud. Back then it was by far the easiest way to have these solutions combined with Online Office Software like Collabora.
In the last years, the need for these Appliances was significantly lower, as both the needs of our customers changed as well as the installation procedures of the Apps became simpler.
As the current App Appliance images include outdated software, we will remove them from the download pages. It is not supported anymore to build new Appliance images based on UCS 5.2.
This should have no impact on any existing installation. Those who have started with such an UCS App Appliance can still install updates for UCS and the Apps, as these instances are a normal UCS and the App updates are provided by the UCS App Center.