What’s new for OMERO 5.1 for sysadmins

• The Version requirements section provides extensive details about which operating systems and dependency versions we will be supporting for the life of 5.1 and the likely changes to these for the next major release (currently planned to be 5.2).
• A new configuration property omero.graphs.wrap allows switching back to the old server code for moving and deleting data. If a regression with the new code requires changing this setting, ensure that a bug is filed with the OME team so it can be fixed before this configuration property is removed in OMERO 5.2.
• The server download policy can now be configured to restrict users’ ability to download the original data e.g. by user or by data type. This is one of the features we have introduced to help support using OMERO for data publication. More information about how to configure your server for this purpose is available in the updated Optimizing OMERO as a Data Repository section.
• OMERO usernames can now be made case insensitive.

Database

• OMERO 5.1 requires Postgres 9.2 or later, the OMERO database upgrade script will not run on older versions.
• OMERO 5.1 requires a Unicode-encoded (UTF8) database, the OMERO.server upgrade page has been updated to reflect this.

OMERO.web

• OMERO.web now defaults to being mounted at the root on all webservers with the exception of IIS (Windows production deployment) where it continues to be mounted on /omero. Static files continue to be served from /static. Both prefixes can be customized (including on IIS) but note the configuration property omero.web.force_script_name has changed to omero.web.prefix.

• Apache 2.4 with mod_proxy_fcgi is now supported.

• OMERO.web FastCGI processes default to listening on 127.0.0.1 instead of all network interfaces. This improves security, see Customizing your OMERO.web installation if you need to listen on another interface.

• If OMERO.web is disabled the generated Nginx and Apache configurations automatically display a maintenance page.

• The semantics of the command for generating the Nginx configuration has been modified as described below:

  Version	5.0.x command	5.1.x command
  System configuration	omero web config nginx --system	omero web config nginx
  User configuration	omero web config nginx	omero web config nginx-development

OMERO.mail

A new additional feature has been added. OMERO.mail allows you to configure the server to email users, for example to alert group owners to broken links in OMERO.web.

OMERO permissions system

Read-Write groups are now (as of OMERO version 5.1.2) supported in the clients. This group type essentially allows all members to act as if they co-own the data except for the ability to move it between groups. Existing groups can be promoted to this permissions level via your usual OMERO admin tool. See Groups and permissions system for more details.