Alfresco Identity Service end of life

[apleach]

At Hyland, we regularly assess our product offerings to ensure they serve customer needs, meet industry requirements and align with our market focus. After review and with the upcoming release of Alfresco Content Services (ACS) 23.1* in Q4 2023, Hyland has chosen to begin the retirement process for Alfresco Identity Service (IDS). The end-of-life date is Sunday, September 1, 2024. More information is shared below.

Replacement option

Moving forward, we suggest customers use the original Keycloak project, a mature open-source project backed by Red Hat. Currently, Alfresco IDS is a thin customized layer on top of Keycloak. Because of this, customers will not lose capabilities when transitioning from Alfresco IDS to Keycloak and the user experience will not be disruptive for existing customers.

Compatible and supported versions of Keycloak will be listed in the official documentation compatibility matrix.

Support information

The recent release of Alfresco IDS 2.0 on Monday, August 14, helps close the gap between Alfresco IDS v1.8 and the latest Keycloak distributions, making Alfresco IDS 2.0 a possible intermediate step if required. Alfresco IDS 2.0 will be supported for one year, but Hyland will not continue the evolution or modernization of the product during this time. Because of this, using the original Keycloak project is the suggested path for customers. 

Customers can continue to contact Hyland support or their technical account manager to discuss Alfresco Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Helpful resources

• Alfresco platform compatibility matrix
• Alfresco IDS tutorial

Contact Hyland support or your technical account manager with questions about this upcoming end-of-life announcement.

*Based on customer feedback, we are simplifying version naming to minimize confusion and employ industry best practices. Hyland will use the new format of product name, year and version number (product name YY.#) for product and solution releases moving forward. More information is available in the naming convention Hyland Community blog post.

[fiendius]

Hello

I checked Alfresco platform compatibility matrix and official documentation compatibility matrix but can't find any listed supported Keycloak Version on the pages as you mentioned in this post.

Did I miss something?

Kind regards

Stefanie

[apleach]

Hi Stefanie,

Thank you for your question.

We currently list the Identity Service (IDS) on the Supported Platforms page that uses our Keycloak fork based distribution.  The release notes for IDS 2.0 mention that the Keycloak fork version has been updated to Keycloak 21.1.2.  As we don’t test against the raw Keycloak 21.1.2 we don’t list it.  We will therefore update the Supported Platforms for Keycloak when the IDS sunset completes.

Thanks Andy.

[shazada]

@Andrew Leach So when transferring from IDS to keycloack there is no migration guide needed?

So one can just take the equivalent Keycloack project, rename the image tag to that version and everything will keep working?

Or is there going to be a step by step guide how to migrate to Keycloack?

[Valerio]

Hello @Tahir Malik,

thank you for the question.

We are going to include the required documentation as part of the retirement process.

There are some extra steps that need to be taken into account such as the realm configuration and the Alfresco theme.

The complexity of the migration will depend mainly on the difference between versions of Keycloak, the starting IDS and the target vanilla one:

The best case is when IDS and target Keycloak versions are the same; most of the configuration described for IDS can be applied in a straightforward way to Keycloak. We hope that IDS 2.0 can play an important role in maximizing this scenario.

Moving to a newer version of Keycloak will require a bit more attention. The Red Hat migration guide between the two versions can provide more insight on the amount of work that may be required.

I hope it helps,

Best,

    Valerio

[Sanket_Karjagi]

Where can we find the current standalone distribution?