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Alfresco Community Edition 201611 EA Release Notes

aleach
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
‎11-11-2016 09:01 AM

Alfresco Community Edition 201611 EA Release

These release notes provide information for the 201611 Early Access release of Alfresco Community Edition.

Early access releases are intended for interested parties to test new features, provide feedback, and collaborate on development. This release is not meant to replace the previous generally available release.

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous version of Alfresco Community Edition. Backup your Alfresco alf_data directory and database before upgrading, and read the documentation.

Installation

Download this release from the Alfresco Community Edition file list 201611 EA‌

For download and installation instructions, refer to the Download and Install Alfresco page.

The Alfresco supplied installers will install all you need to run Alfresco on your machine; which includes JDK, Tomcat, SOLR, and LibreOffice. It also includes interfaces and extensions such as Share, the Google Docs integration, and the AOS module.

Notes:

  • JVM memory defaults to half system memory, minimum of 2GB.
  • Latest OS patches are always recommended.

Goals for this Release

Our focus while developing Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 has been to strengthen Alfresco as a content platform by building a new set of REST APIs that are used by the Alfresco Application Development Framework. We are also rolling out some nice improvements to Alfresco Share, and laying the foundation for future improvements by allowing Solr 6 to be used for search indexes. This release also contains many bug fixes and library upgrades.

We have completed the majority of feature development that we have planned for the 5.2 series of releases, and are stabilizing the product in preparation for a Generally Available release. We encourage you to test this release in order to give us feedback on its quality. We are looking forward to feedback on how the APIs are structured and how they function.

We identified some incompatibilities between Records Management and the 5.2 series of Share and Platform releases, and therefore we removed the RM module from this release. We are working to include the Records Management module in our next release of Alfresco Community Edition.

Please report issues with this release in the issue tracker. You can collaborate on this release in the Alfresco forums. Other feedback can be provided by emailing community@alfresco.com.

Notable New Features

The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 lists all the features in the 5.2 line of Alfresco releases.

Platform

Trash Can Cleaner - REPO-1333

The Trashcan Cleaner is a scheduled job that will empty your Alfresco trashcan. Draft documentation is attached to REPO-1526. This feature incorporates the work originally contributed by Bertrand Magnier and Julien Berthoux while at ATOL Conseils & développements, then improved by Rui Fernandes and Philippe Dubois.

New REST APIs

New and updated endpoints (since Community 201609) include:

  • POST /people to create a user (admin only)
  • GET /people to list users
  • PUT /people/{peopleId} to update a users profile (admin only for now, see REPO-1544)
  • GET /sites and GET /people/{peopleId}/sites enhanced with ability to filter by site visibility and site preset (site info also now returns the preset)
  • PUT /sites to update site details
  • GET /shared-links/{sharedId}/renditions/{renditionId} to complete the set of APIs for shared link renditions
  • GET /discovery was added to determine server version, license info (for Enterprise) and server status i.e. if audit is enabled, read-only mode etc.

These APIs are browse-able in the REST API Explorer v1.3 (GitHub - alfresco-rest-api-explorer) to navigate the details. This is included in the SDK, or can be installed by adding the WAR to your Alfresco install and configuring CORS.

See also Alfresco 5.2 REST APIs to find links to more information about the new REST APIs.

Share

Uploading Folders - SHA-1698

Users can upload folders into My Files, Shared Files and Site Document Libraries by dragging and dropping the folder directly into the desired location on the Share user interface.  Dropping a folder will automatically create the folder, its subfolders and all files within the folder structure, empty folders are also created automatically

Creating Shortcut Links - SHA-1629

When copying a file to a different location a user can choose to create a Shortcut Link in the destination location instead of creating a copy.  When a user opens a Shortcut Link they are redirected to the original files location, users without permission to access to the original file will not be able to open a Shortcut Link successfully.

Search Term Highlighting - SHA-233

The search term entered by users is highlighted in the Search Results page when it is found in a filename, title & description to help users more easily identify the content they are looking for. The search results page also extracts and displays a snippet of relevant text from a document that contains the search term.

Bulk File Actions on Search Results - SHA-1439

In the Search Results screen users can select multiple results and perform file actions such as copying, moving, deleting, and downloading as a zip file.

Managing Requests to Join Sites - SHA-1621 & SHA-1511

Site Managers will receive a notification when another user requests to join their moderated site, the email links through the Site Members > Pending tab where new UI displays all pending requests to join.

Improved UX of Site Creation - SHA-1612

A new Create Site screen has been implemented, the screen will now inform users when they are creating a site that has the same name as a site that already exists.  The new screen has been created using Aikau.

Login Redirect from a Public Document Share - SHA-1616

When logging in from a Public QuickShare URL users will now be redirected back so that they can access the Document Details for the shared file instead of going to their user dashboard.

Search

Alfresco Search Services + SOLR 6 - SEARCH-3

Alfresco now supports Solr 6.3 although Solr 4 remains the default. As part of the introduction we are also separating the distribution of Solr from the platform to allow us to update it more regularly in the future. Administrators who want to deploy Solr 6 can download the new Alfresco Search Services artefact and install from there.

Search term highlighting - SEARCH-127

New feature added to the API where by search term entered by users is highlighted in the results returned when it is found in a filename, title & description to help users more easily identify the content they are looking for. 

Multi-select facets - SEARCH-107

The new REST API also now supports multi-select faceting.

Mobile

This Early Access Alfresco Java Client SDK contains a Java lib project to easily consume Alfresco Public REST APIs. It includes a set of APIs that allows developers to quickly build Alfresco-enabled Java & Android applications:

https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2016/11/17/alfresco-java-client-sdk 

Feature Removals

No features have been removed in this release.

Contents

  • Alfresco Platform 5.2.c (SCM tag)
  • Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.c
  • Alfresco Share 5.2.b (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.c
  • Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.b
  • Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
  • AOS Module 1.1.3
  • Aikau 1.0.93 (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco SDK 2.2.0

3rd Party Components:

  • Java 1.8.0_111
  • Tomcat 7.0.59
  • LibreOffice 5.2.1
  • PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • ImageMagick 6.9.1.10

Issues Addressed

This release contains all bug fixes since the Community Edition 5.0.d release.

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 5.1 releases to get a complete list of issues addressed since the previous GA release (5.0.d). Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.

  • ALF: Improvements to Alfresco requested by open source collaborators. Most issues are linked to another project to get assigned to a team.
  • ACE: Improvements to Alfresco requested by product management.
  • MNT: Fixes to Alfresco requested by customers (many are private).
  • SHA: Improvements to Alfresco Share.
  • REPO: Improvements to the Alfresco ECM Repository.
  • AKU: Improvements to the Aikau UI library used by Share and other interfaces.
  • RM: Changes to Records Management.
  • SEARCH: Fixes to Search and Discovery

Important fixes since the last GA release:

  • MNT-16259: Some installs need to change the 'admin' user password after upgrading. See SA-8.
  • MNT-15795: CAS authentication via the external auth subsystem no longer works. This issue contains a patch.
  • ALF-21607: Problems with SSO via Kerberos. This issue contains a patch to a number of related issues.
  • SHA-1717 The "Hide Getting Started" panel settings icon was missing.
  • ALF-21398: Advanced Search Yields No Results When Using Hyphens in Custom Property Values (Thank you to Cory Solovewicz for helping us to track it down.)
  • SHA-1717  Settings icon is missing in the Hide Get Started Panel confirmation dialog
  • MNT-16638 Folder access in 'private' sites using site path url fails versus repository url path (see also SHA-1682)
  • MNT-16221 Infinite 302 HTTP redirect loop when using External Authentication with uppercase usernames/username case sensitivity
  • MNT-16517 cmSmiley Surprisedwner Aspect is missing from the folder details page
  • MNT-15838 Filmstrip view in share crashes the browser when a folder contains many large images
  • MNT-16532 DojoDependencyHandler - cached generated resources use significant amount of heap memory
  • MNT-15376 NTLM authentication sometimes fails with IE10+
  • MNT-16517 cmSmiley Surprisedwner Aspect is missing from the folder details page
  • MNT-15708 Expose Repo Admin Tools within share (link)

Prerequisites for manual install

  • DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • App Server: Tomcat 7
  • Java Version: JDK 8
  • LibreOffice 5.2

Known Issues

  • SDK 2.2.0 needs a modification to work with Platform 5.2.a and Share 5.1.g. An example of the needed modifications are in this GitHub project and will be included in this section of the documentation.
  • The Alfresco Records Management Module is known to not be compatible with Alfresco Platform 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2. We expect to include a compatible Records Management Module in the next release of Alfresco Community Edition.

Please refer to the Alfresco issue tracker for other known issues in this release.

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