Alfresco Content Services 7.2 is a minor software update release with improvements to Alfresco Content Services to accelerate use and development for customer solutions for deployment. With Alfresco Content Services 7.2, Alfresco continues to enable open source communities, customers and partners to deliver a highly reliable Content Store upon which to build applications and solutions.
Alfresco Content Services 7.2 delivers functionality to enable customers and developers to install Alfresco created solutions and to customise the product through integrations, APIs and SDKs.
Additionally, customers can purchase an upgrade from Alfresco Community Edition to Alfresco Content Services 7.2 to enable advanced features and purchase Alfresco applications, connectivity and solutions. To learn more about the differences of Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Content Services, we have a datasheet here that highlight the gains of upgrading to Alfresco Content Services.
This release contains enhancements completed for the release of Alfresco Content Services 7.2. In addition, this release contains an updated stack of supported databases, operating systems and platforms providing up to date support. All hot fixes and patches from Alfresco Content Services 7.0.0 onwards are included in this release.
Alfresco’s release readiness testing team have successfully completed their regression and upgrade testing cycles to help give you confidence to upgrade to the release. Alfresco Community Edition 7.2 shares much of its code with Alfresco Content Services which adds significant functionality in the release.
Goals for this Release
The main goal of this release is to enable customers, partners and experimenters to create solutions built on top of Alfresco’s content repository. As Alfresco and Hyland have a continuing commitment to Open Source, we value your feedback on the Hyland Community Hub.
Use Cases
Please report issues with this Alfresco Community Edition 7.2 using GitHub Issues or by using the discussion tools in the Alfresco Hub for Alfresco Community Edition.
Installation
Alfresco Community Edition 7.2 is available as a distribution zip file for manual installation, or it can be installed using an Ansible playbook (Linux only) for non-containerized environments. It is also available as a set of Docker images that can be deployed in containerized environments using docker-compose or Helm charts (for Kubernetes).
You can find a summary of these options here:
https://www.alfresco.com/products/community/download
ZIP artifacts
Downloadable ZIP artifacts are available in:
Upgrading from previous releases
Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous releases of Alfresco Community Edition 7.2. There are some steps that should be reviewed and planned before you upgrade. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the guidance below and plan your upgrade.
Please refer to the detailed Upgrading documentation, including Alfresco Content Services upgrade paths.
In particular, please ensure that the following steps are completed before you start your upgrade process:
Note When relying on Search Services, usage of unauthenticated plain HTTP communication between ACS 7.2 and Solr is not supported anymore. In order to use this kind of communication additional steps have to be taken compared to previous releases. You need to switch to SECRET or mTLS communication method, if using HTTP.
Specific Release Components
Content Repository
New (Cloud Storage Info)
New (Delete Rendition)
Updated (Cloud Storage Info)
New (Direct Access Url) (MNT-22696)
Updated (Direct Access Url)
Updated (Upload) (MNT-22462)
REST API Explorer
REST API Explorer is 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).
To navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints GitHub - rest-api-explorer.
Alfresco Share
The latest release of Share is 7.2.0.
Search Services
Alfresco Search Services for Community Edition is 2.0 remains the latest release. Solr 6 is the underlying search engine for 2.0.
Note When relying on Search Services, usage of unauthenticated plain HTTP communication between ACS 7.2 and Solr is not encouraged. In order to use this kind of communication additional steps have to be taken compared to previous releases. You need to switch to SECRET or mTLS communication method, if using HTTP.
Alfresco Governance Services
AGS 7.2.0 is the latest release and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.
Alfresco Mobile
Alfresco Mobile Workspace is 1.2 and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.
We have sunset the Alfresco content Service Mobile App for iOS and Android, these applications have reached their EOM and are no longer supported. The replacement and fully supported application is Alfresco Mobile Workspace.
SDK
The latest release of the Alfresco in-process SDK is SDK 4.4, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.
The latest release of the Alfresco out-of-process Event SDK is SDK 5.1, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2 and the new SDK Event Gateway.
Alfresco Extension Inspector
This optional utility helps partners and customers better understand the customisations in their existing deployments. The Alfresco Extension Inspector is a utility for AMP inspection for Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Content Services 5.2.7, 6.2.2, 7.x releases. The inspector is recommended for use before installing new versions of our product to help expose any issues that might impeded success.
The alfresco-extension-inspector is a tool that scans and validates an Alfresco extension (amp or jar) against an alfresco.war file. The tool parses an extension and generates a report on possible overrides, discouraged usage of nonpublic API, Alfresco's 3rd-party libraries and incompatible libraries.
To download Alfresco Extension Inspector from Nexus click here or from GitHub.
Documentation
The documentation has been refreshed for this release:
https://docs.alfresco.com/content-services/community/
Localization
The Content Repository supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Simplified Chinese.
Share supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese.
Alfresco Mobile app 1.2 supports French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch only.
Feature Removals
No removal of 3rd party libraries
Contents
Images are available on Docker Hub
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.
3rd Party Components installed in the docker containers
Library Upgrades
A number of underlying libraries have been updated in both the Repository and Share.
If you’re upgrading from ACS 6.x to ACS 7.x, check out the Migration Guide to find out if your integrations need refactoring actions.
Issues Addressed
The MNT (Maintenance) issues addressed in this release are below.
Known Issues
None