Alfresco Community Edition 201707 GA Release Notes

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• Alfresco Community Edition 201707 GA Release Notes
• Installation
• Goals for this Release
• Notes on Specific Release Components
• Notable New Features in this Release
• Content Repository
• GhostScript Removal
• New REST APIs
• REST API EXPLORER
• Bug Fixes
• Share
• Search Services
• Governance Services
• Mobile
• SDK
• Documentation
• Localisation
• Feature Removals
• Contents
• Artifacts
• Prerequisites for Manual Install
• Issues Addressed
• Known Issues

Alfresco Community Edition 201707 GA Release Notes

These release notes provide information for the 201707 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the next Generally Available release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2. This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services 5.2.0 in February of 2017 through June of 2017.

We expect this release to be the last Alfresco Community Edition GA built off of Content Services 5.2, as it is time to add new features targeted at the next release Alfresco Content Services.

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

The latest GA release of Alfresco Community Edition is available from the Alfresco Community Edition product page.

Download this release from Alfresco Community Edition file list 201704 ‌.

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

This release contains fixes from the Alfresco Content Services  5.2.1 Service Pack that is expected to be released in July 2017. It also contains additional bug fixes and improvements for which members of the open source community suggested patches.

This release also updates the list of supported platform stacks based on our provisional testing. Testing of these updated stacks will not be completed until the Alfresco Content Services 5.2.2 service pack scheduled for release in October of 2017, but we consider these updates to be sufficiently safe for a GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This release makes available to users of Alfresco Community Edition the latest releases of Alfresco Search Services 1.1.0 and RM 2.6.a which contain new APIs but no significant changes in behavior.

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

Notes on Specific Release Components

• Solr4 is included as the default search provider in this release. Interested administrators can download and configure Alfresco Search Services which includes Solr6.

Notable New Features in this Release

As a Generally Available release, the focus of this release has been on stability and not on new features.

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

Content Repository

GhostScript Removal

Due to a license change in GhostScript, we replaced it with PDFium. PDFium is the PDF engine shipped with Chromium. In our tests, PDFium produces equivalent results to GhostScript with less processing or memory usage. PDFium is wrapped with an alfresco-pdf-renderer executable, and the Administration Console has two new properties specifying the location of the alfresco-pdf-renderer executable and working directory, but these properties should not be touched in a normal installation.

New REST APIs

New Endpoints (since Community 201612) include:

• Group Management API, retrieving & managing Group Membership is now available under    /groups
• Downloads API, for downloading a set of files as a ZIP is now available under   /downloads
• Password Reset (including email notification) can now be requested via  POST /people/{personId}/request-password-reset
• Password Reset (including email notification) can now be reset via POST /people/{personId}/reset-password

Updated Endpoints (since Community 201612) include:

• POST /shared-links/{sharedId}/email  sends email with app-specific url including identifier sharedId.
• Shared Link API now has option to "include=path"
• Favorites API now has option to "include=path"

REST API EXPLORER

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (v5.2.g) is available (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 public REST APIs to find links to more information about the new REST APIs.

Bug Fixes

We also addressed a number of bugs since the release of Alfresco Community Edition 201702.

Share

Bug fixes only.

Search Services

Is addition to bug fixes, the 1.1.0 release contains new Search API features:

• Content reporting
  • Stats, range, interval, pivot
  • Timezone and locale
• Improved API user experience
  • Option added to return the original request with the response
  • For a given facet entry include the filter query
  • Group facet queries that go together
• Multi-select OR option
• Mimetype grouping

Governance Services

Update to GS Core ReST APIs, GS API Explorer and RM Benchmark Driver. 

• The ReST API endpoints allow management of the RM site, record categories, record folders, unfiled containers and unfiled record folders. Upload of new records, record declaration and filing of records in the file plan as well retrieving transfer information are also supported.
• The API Explorer allows you to explore and test the new ReST APIs.
• The RM Benchmark Driver allows you to create large amounts of test data for evaluating system performance in your environments.

More details are available in the blog post https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2017/06/27/records-management-community-26a?sr=sea....

Update: There is a new release of the RM module that works with the 201707 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition, which includes the complete record operation to the REST API. The updated module and additional details are available in the blog post Records Management 2.6.b.

Mobile

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release.

We provide an Early Access release of an Alfresco Java Client SDK which 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 

SDK

Alfresco SDK 3.0 brings a lot of new changes into the way your customizations are built, packaged, run and tested.

• JAR Packaging
• AMP packaging as an assembly
• Improved compatibility - supports 4.2.x - 5.2.x and onwards
• Easy upgrades - simply change the "alfresco-maven-plugin" version to upgrade the SDK
• No forced parent pom - also means we have no profiles
• All run and integration testing logic moved to the Alfresco Maven Plugin
• Integration Testing directly on running repositories
• Simplified archetypes
• Hot Reloading via HotSwapAgent or JRebel

The majority of the work in SDK 3.0 has gone into moving all the previous profiles into the Alfresco Maven Plugin. The plugin now offers two new goals "alfresco:run" and "alfresco:it" for executing integration tests.

This release has been published on Maven Central.

Documentation

The documentation is currently published at docs.alfresco.com: Alfresco Community Edition. 

Localisation

This release includes: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese versions.

Feature Removals

The removal of GhostScript in this release forced us to stop building installers for Win32 (MNT-17909). We have also chose to deprecate the installation bundle for OSX (MNT-17972), which will not be built for future releases. Neither of those operating systems are recommended for use as servers and those installers were used by less than 10% of people who downloaded the product. Yet they took significant resources to maintain and to test.

People who require Win32 in this release are likely to be able to continue using the distribution.zip coupled with a 32 bit installation of Java, but in the future it is likely that Alfresco will have a hard dependency on 64 bit Java.

Users of OSX will likely be able to continue using the distribution.zip for some time, but they are likely to have the most success running Alfresco on Linux in a virtual machine or container. This is the development approach taken by a large percentage of our engineering team.

Contents

• Records Management 2.6.a (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.g (SCM tag)
• Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.d
• Alfresco Share 5.2.f (SCM tag)
• Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.e
• Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.d
• Alfresco Search Services 1.1.0
• Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
• AOS Module 1.1.6
• Aikau 1.0.101.3 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco SDK 3.0.0

3rd Party Components:

• Java 1.8.0_131
• Tomcat 7.0.78
• LibreOffice 5.2.1
• PostgreSQL 9.4.12
• ImageMagick 6.9.1-10

Artifacts

• alfresco-platform-5.2.g.war contains version 5.2.g (build re21f2be5-b22).
• alfresco-5.2.g.war not built.
• alfresco-share-services-5.2.f.amp contains version 5.2.f.
• share-5.2.f.war contains version 5.2.f.
• alfresco-solr-5.2.g.war contains version 5.2.g.
• alfresco-search-services-1.1.0.zip built.

Prerequisites for Manual Install

• DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.12
• App Server: Tomcat 7
• Java Version: JDK 8
• LibreOffice 5.2

Issues Addressed

This release contains all bug fixes since the Alfresco Community Edition 5.0.d release and up to the Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release. This release  contains exactly the same artefacts as 201702 but with the addition of Records Management 2.5.b

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 5.2 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's products requested by open source collaborators. Most issues are linked to another project to get assigned to a team.
• ACE: Improvements to Alfresco's products requested by product management. Most issues are linked to another project to get assigned to a team.
• MNT: Fixes to Alfresco's products requested by customers (many are private).
• SHA: Improvements to Alfresco Share.
• REPO: Improvements to the Alfresco Content Repository.
• AKU: Improvements to the Aikau UI library used by Share and other interfaces.
• RM: Changes to Records Management.
• SEARCH: Fixes to Search and Discover
• SDK: Improvements to the Alfresco SDK

Important fixes in this GA release:

• Please refer to the RM link above under Issues Addressed.

Known Issues

• RM-5074 Some RM labels are missing translations.
• The alfresco-pdf-renderer binaries are included in the installation bundles, but they are not included in the distribution.zip. Manual installations will need to download the 1.0 release from the Nexus artifact repository and follow the documented installation instructions.
• MNT-18404 ImageMagick Execution Fails For Alfresco 5.2.1 On Windows. This is a serious bug because it causes all ImageMagick transforms to fail on Windows. It was discovered after the release and is expected to be fixed in the next release.

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