Ease of Alfresco Upgrades - Your opinion...

[sduis]

I am testing out Alfresco Community in hopes of implementing it for the local government agency I work for. We started with a test site in version 3.4, and now that 4.0 is available I'd like to upgrade our test site and check that out as well. However, our IT staff is concerned that no upgrade path has been provided for transitioning from 3.4 to 4.0.

We have found other forum posts (such as this one) describing how to do manage the 4.0 upgrade, with some leg-work. I also read the General Upgrade Process wiki, but here there's nothing listed there for upgrading to version 3.4 or 4.0 yet. I realize 4.0 is a major upgrade and was very recently released, but this has led us to wonder how past updates have been presented and how easy they were to implement for others. 

So … for those of you who have been using Alfresco for some time, what's your impression of the update process for Alfresco's Community platform? What should we expect for future Community updates? Have updates been consistently easy/difficult over the months/years you've used Alfresco, or have they varied? Is the 4.0 update very different from past updates? (The 4.0 transition seems a lot more complicated to this troglodyte.)

Background info: We have a very small support staff working on this project (i.e, records manager (me) and one IT guru). We would implement Alfresco Share (and possibly Records Management later on) as-is without a lot of customization. Budgets are beyond tight, but I'm still hopeful we can move forward. What I'm really hoping for is some reassurance that future upgrades can be handled by us, in-house, without a lot of grunt work and a big learning curve.

Thanks in advance for your input. The amount of support from users we've seen on these forums is a big reason we decided to go with Alfresco!

[cloudcontrol]

I just performed 2 upgrades from 3.4.d to 4.0.c and was pleased with the ease of the upgrade path.

We deploy from .war file by downloading the latest nightly build, not the bitrock installer. Some customizations we had done incorrectly in the WEB-INF path needed to be redone, but other than that everything was very smooth- the mysql DB migrations threw up a few warnings, but we have not seen any application errors yet.