Question
What is the future of Open-Xchange (OX) on UCS after the end of life of OX7?
Answer
Open-Xchange 7 (OX7) is expected to reach its end of life (EOL) at the end of 2026. Since OX8 follows a different deployment model, there will be no direct migration path from the UCS App Center installation of OX7 to OX8 on UCS.
Will OX disappear from the UCS App Center?
Applications that are no longer supported are typically marked accordingly in the UCS App Center. Depending on their status, they may no longer be installable or may be displayed as deprecated.
Existing installations are not automatically removed. However, unsupported applications may no longer receive feature, bugfix, or security updates.
Is OX8 the only successor?
If you want to continue using Open-Xchange, migrating to OX8 is currently the only realistic upgrade path. OX8 is designed to run on Kubernetes (K8s) environments and is no longer supported as a traditional UCS app or bare-metal installation.
A cloud deployment is not mandatory; OX8 can also be operated on-premises within a Kubernetes environment.
The OX Connector for UCS remains available for OX8 deployments.
Is there a migration path from UCS OX7 to OX8?
Currently, there is no planned direct migration path from the UCS App Center version of OX7 to OX8. Customers are therefore advised to either:
- Deploy a dedicated OX8 instance on Kubernetes and continue using the UCS OX Connector.
- Evaluate alternative groupware solutions.
What alternatives are available?
Organizations that are planning a migration may also consider moving away from Open-Xchange entirely. One available alternative is EGroupware, which can be installed via the UCS App Center.
Other groupware solutions can also be integrated with UCS using LDAP for user management and authentication. Typical features such as email, calendars, contacts, WebDAV, and ActiveSync are available in many alternative products.
Recommendation
Customers currently running OX7 on UCS should begin evaluating their long-term strategy before the end of 2026. This includes reviewing the requirements for Kubernetes-based OX8 deployments or assessing alternative groupware platforms that better fit their infrastructure and operational model.