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Alfresco Community Edition 201806 GA Release Notes

aleach
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
‎05-01-2018 09:30 AM

Alfresco Community Edition 201806 GA Release Notes

Release Notes

These release notes provide information for the 201806 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the first GA release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0. This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services through April of 2018, including a number of fixes contributed by the open source community.

This is the Generally Available release of Alfresco Community Edition 6.0.  We believe that this release is ready for the GA label because:

It has all the features we expect to add in the 6.0 series of releases, with only a few relatively small new features added since the previous release.  We have received positive feedback on the last EA releases suggesting that people are successful with them.

Our release readiness testing team has completed their first testing cycle and hit their first checkpoint adding confidence to the 6.0 release of Enterprise Edition.  The Enterprise Edition shares most of its code with this Community Edition release.

Our focus remains on fixing bugs and polishing the product, we expect this to be the only GA release before the Enterprise GA on the 11-July.

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous version of Alfresco Community Edition. Before upgrading, test that you have a functional backup of your Alfresco Repository, and read the documentation.

Installation

Alfresco Community Edition is available both as a distribution zip file containing the war files and as docker images that are deployed using docker-compose.

The Alfresco Community Edition docker images are available on DockerHub.

To run this GA release with docker:

  1. You need to have Docker installed on your machine
  2. Make sure that the ports 5432, 8080, 8082 and 8083 are available on your machine
  3. Get the docker-compose.yml file and the .env file from this release tag. ATTENTION: Into the .env file check that ALFRESCO_TAG=6.0.7-ga. If not, change it accordingly.
  4. Run docker-compose up
  5. Check that everything starts up with the browser: http://localhost:8082/alfresco and http://localhost:8080/share and http://localhost:8083/solr/

Please refer to the "Docker-compose & Kubernetes" instructions on Github - acs-community-packaging for additional details. See also the notes below.

If you wish to run Alfresco Community Edition from plain war files, for instance to update an existing system, you can still download the distribution zip file from the Alfresco Community 201806 GA File List.

Notes:

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

  • It is recommended to have at least 4GB of RAM available on the system.
  • Latest OS patches are always recommended.

Goals for this Release

There are several architectural improvements in the 6.0 family of releases including library upgrades and a new deployment process based on Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.

In addition to the various improvements we have made since the last release of Alfresco Community Edition, this release includes the third of our disruptive library upgrades which might impact compatibility with releases based on the Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.

The main goal of this release is to get feedback on our new deployment process. You can leave that feedback in comments on this page, or by Reporting an Issue‌. We are getting closer to a Enterprise GA on the 11-July of the Content Repository.

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

  • Solr6 is included as the default search provider in this release. Solr4 will continue to be available to facilitate upgrades

Notable New Features in this Release

The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 6.0 lists all the features in the 6.0 line of Alfresco releases.

Content Repository

The source code for the packaging project that is used to create and run docker images and build the distribution zip can be found here. 

Dockerized deployment

This release comes with a set of docker images instead of a GUI installer. These docker images produce a deployment that is more closely aligned with production best practices than the previous installers were capable of creating. The docker-compose and helm charts can be found in a separate project acs-community-deployment and for this release the changes were tagged with 6.0.7-ga.

To configure Alfresco Community Edition, it is recommended to add -Dkey=value properties to the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in the docker-compose.yml file. In this GA release, all the data is still stored inside the docker containers. This is sufficient for test and development purposes. For production like environments however, it is recommended to mount locations on the host machine into the containers so that all the data (content store, DB and SOLR indexes) gets stored on the host.

Anonymous usage metrics

No incremental updates since last Alfresco Community Edition 201803 EA Release when we began to send anonymous usage metrics to Alfresco through the heartbeat service. These metrics are sent every 24 hours and include: version information, numbers of users and groups, numbers of models, aspects and types, whether smart folders are enabled or not as well as the JVM total, max and free memory size. On the receiving side, we detect the country where the data is sent from, but we do not store the IP address of reports coming from our open source products.

Alfresco is using this data to better target new features and their prioritisation to actual usage patterns. We also track the adoption of new versions and features in our install base.  To see exactly what is being sent, feel free to look at the log output generated by

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.heartbeat.datasender.internal.HBDataConsumer=DEBUG

If you wish to deactivate this data transmission, then you just need to add

heartbeat.enabled=false

to your configuration, either as value in alfresco-global.properties or as part of the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in the docker-compose file.

Library Upgrades

  • Biggest upgrade is on Jackson libraries which was upgraded to version 2.9.5
  • JLan library upgraded to 7.1

Default services

FTP support is now disabled by default. Those who want to use it need to activate it manually. This produces a more secure default configuration.

CIFS support is now disabled by default. We recommend not using CIFS, as the protocol has been deprecated by Microsoft due to security vulnerabilities. We expect to remove support for CIFS in the future.

REST APIs

The repository's liveness and readiness probes are provided as a V1 REST API and perform the same action as the 'discovery' API but without authentication or returning any information about the repository other than a status code to indicate if the repository pod has fully started up and that it is still healthy.

REST API Explorer

 

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (6.0.7-ga) is available on GitHub - rest-api-explorer to navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints. This version includes support to check readiness and liveness of the repository. The readiness probe is normally only used to check repository startup. Liveness probe should then be used to check the repository is still responding to requests.

Share

We released a new version of Share, version 6.0.b which contains a few bug fixes. For further details please consult the list of share issues fixed in this release at the bottom of the page under Issues Addressed.

Search Services

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201802 EA Release.

Governance Services

The latest version of the RM module is 2.7.b but unfortunately is not compatible with Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.x. Compatibility with community release of ACS 6.0.x is our priority for the next release in AGS 3.0.a, additional details are available in the release blog post: Records Management Community 2.7.b.

Mobile

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release. 

SDK

The Alfresco SDK is not yet updated with the new code locations. For more details, see More of Alfresco Content Services on GitHub. 

Documentation

The documentation has been refreshed for this release. 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

No new features have been removed in this specific release.

In this family of releases, the following features were deprecated and are disabled by default:

A number of features are considered deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

  • NTLMv1: Use Kerberos. See https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2017/11/03/moving-from-smb-to-webdav?sr=search&sea...‌
  • Web Application Servers apart from Tomcat: Support for an external Tomcat is likely to also be removed in the future. Use the Tomcat provided with the application.
  • Repository Multi-Tenancy
  • Encrypted Node Properties
  • Meeting Workspace and Document Workspace
  • Some Share Features: site blogs, site calendars, site data lists, site links, and site discussion forums
  • Web Quick Start and the Web Editor

More information is available in https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2018/01/03/architecture-changes-for-alfresco-conte...‌

Contents

  • Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.7-ga (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco Share 6.0.b (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 6.2.1 (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco Search Services 1.1.1 (SCM tag)
  • Google Docs 3.1.0 (SCM tag)
  • AOS Module 1.2.0 (SCM tag)
  • alfresco-pdf-renderer 1.1

3rd Party Components installed in the docker containers:

  • CentOS 7
  • Java 8
  • Tomcat 8.5.28
  • LibreOffice 5.4.5
  • PostgreSQL 9.4.12
  • ImageMagick 7.0.7-27

Additional docker containers used in docker-compose file:

  • docker.io/library/postgres:9.4.12

Artifacts

    • alfresco-content-services-community-distribution-6.0.7-ga.zip

    • alfresco-file-transfer-receiver-6.2.1.zip

    • alfresco-search-services-1.1.1.zip

Prerequisites for Manual Install

  • DB: MySQL or PostgreSQL
  • Apache Tomcat
  • Java JDK
  • LibreOffice
  • ImageMagick

You should use the same versions as we have in the docker containers (see above).

Issues Addressed

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 6.0 releases to get a complete list of issues addressed since the previous GA release (Alfresco Community Edition 201707 GA Release Notes). 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.
  • REPO: Improvements to the Alfresco Content Repository.
  • RM: Changes to Records Management.
  • SHA : Improvements in Share.

Known Issues

  • The Alfresco SDK is not yet compatible with this release.
  • Records Management is not yet compatible with this release. See: ALF-21981 and RM-5872
  • The Kubernetes and Helm deployment process is not working in this release.

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

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