Alfresco Community Edition 201911 GA Release Notes

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Alfresco Community Edition 201911 GA Release Notes

These release notes provide information for the 201911 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 6.2.0-ga.  This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services through November of 2019.

We believe that this release is ready for the GA label because:

It has all the features we expect to add in the 6.2 series of releases.  We have received positive feedback on the 201910 EA release suggesting that people are successful with them.

Our release readiness testing team have successfully completed their Enterprise Edition testing cycles adding confidence.  The Enterprise Edition shares much of its code with this Community Edition release.

This will be the only Community GA release following the ACS 6.2 Enterprise GA on the 21-Nov.

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.

We have summarized these options here:

https://www.alfresco.com/products/community/download

Goals for this Release

The main goal of this release is to get feedback. You can leave that feedback in comments on this page, or by Reporting an Issue‌.

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.

Content Repository

• Custom Transforms and Renditions

Alfresco Content Services (ACS) provides a number of content transforms, but also allows custom transforms to be added.

It is now possible to create custom transforms that run in separate processes known as Transform Engines. The same engines may be used in Community and Enterprise Editions. They may be directly connected to the ACS repository as Local Transforms. It should be noted that in the Enterprise edition the default option is to use them as part of the Alfresco Transform Service which provides more balanced throughput and scalability improvements.

For more information see Custom Transforms and Renditions

• Core Transform Engines

The core Transform Engines images can now be used in Community Edition.

Transform Engines code has been open-sourced and is available on Github:

• alfresco/alfresco-transform-core

Images are available on Docker Hub:

• alfresco/alfresco-imagemagick
• alfresco/alfresco-pdf-renderer
• alfresco/alfresco-libreoffice
• alfresco/alfresco-tika
• alfresco/alfresco-transform-misc
  
  

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. 

Bug Fixes

We also addressed a number of bugs since the release of Alfresco Community Edition 201910, more details in the Issues Addressed section below.

REST API Explorer

REST API Explorer is now integrated into alfresco-repository-community docker image. It is accessible via the link provided in the /alfresco page either via using /api-explorer context on alfrescoServerPath (alfrescoScheme://alfrescoHost:alfrescoPort).

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (6.2.0) is available on GitHub - rest-api-explorer to navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints. This version includes a new API definition for Alfresco Insight Engine.

Share

The latest version of Share is 6.2.0. For further details please consult the list of issues fixed in this release at the bottom of the page under Issues Addressed.

Search Services

The latest version of Alfresco Search Services is 1.4.

Governance Services

AGS 3.2 is the latest GA edition and is compatible with ACS 6.2. 

Mobile

The latest version of Content Services for Android is version 1.8.7 which contains a number of minor improvements and fixes.

The latest version of Content Services for iOS is version 2.7.2 which contains a number of minor improvements and fixes.

SDK

The latest version of the Alfresco SDK is SDK 4.1, which is compatible with ACS 6.2 and available now.   

Documentation

The documentation has been refreshed for this release. The documentation is currently published at docs.alfresco.com: Alfresco Community Edition

Localization

This release includes localization into five new languages Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Finnish in addition to the current supported language set: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese versions.  

Feature Removals

No further deprecations have been EOL’d/ removed from this release.

Contents

• Alfresco Content Repository 6.2.0-ga (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Share 6.2.0 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 6.2.1 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Search Services 1.4 (SCM tag)
• Google Docs 3.1.0 (SCM tag)
• AOS Module 1.3.0 (SCM tag)

3rd Party Components installed in the docker containers:

• CentOS 7 x64
• Open JDK 11.0.1
• Tomcat 8.5.43
• PostgreSQL 11.4

Additional docker containers used in docker-compose file:

• docker.io/library/postgres:11.4

Artifacts

• alfresco-content-services-community-distribution-6.2.0-ga.zip
• Alfresco-file-transfer-receiver-6.2.1.zip
• alfresco-search-services-1.4.zip

Prerequisites for Manual Install

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

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, which are ALF, REPO, RM, MNT and SHA. 

• 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.
• MNT: Maintenance. 
• SHA: Improvements in Share.

Issues Addressed

Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.

Known Issues

• The following 2 related issues raised in GitHub are known issues with workarounds that have been documented in the issues:
• Can't list users in admin tools - https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-community-packaging/issues/367
• Community version calling enterprise api. -  https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-community-deployment/issues/85

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