Originally published at: https://nextcloud.com/blog/update-18-0-3-and-17-0-5-out-update-soon/
Yesterday we made available minor releases with some critical bugfixes to Nextcloud 17 and 18. Please, upgrade at your earliest convenience! These are in-between updates outside our usual schedule to bring you some fixes as soon as possible.
Note: running web facing software without regular updates is risky. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed! As part of our security policy, we release security advisories two weeks after we made available updates.
You’re probably happy to learn that keeping your apps updated with Nextcloud 18 has become easier: a simple update all button takes care of it.
Nextcloud 18 is further stabilizing
With a quickly growing userbase, Nextcloud Hub is stabilizing accordingly. As a matter of fact, with over 150.000 downloads already, our statistics suggest that 18 has overtaken 17 as the Nextcloud release with the most users!
Nextcloud Hub introduces many new features and improvements. Among those is that we now ship, by default, Nextcloud Talk, Groupware and ONLYOFFICE. If you are upgrading, you will move from the Gallery app to the new Photos, but Talk, Groupware and ONLYOFFICE will not be installed automatically as we don’t want to surprise admins. However, we do recommend to install them yourself!
Read this blog on how to add ONLYOFFICE with just a few clicks to your Nextcloud server, find out what is new in Talk here and stay tuned for more detailed blogs on the many improvements we made in our Calendar and Mail apps.
If you need some time to plan an upgrade to 18, we recommend to update your existing stable release in the mean time. Note that if you are still on 15, this release is unmaintained and you should upgrade as soon as possible.
Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!
Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!
This is, of course, also true for apps: Keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.
If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as system administrator.
