Migrating from Alfresco Enterprise Edition to Alfresco Community Edition
One of the reasons that Alfresco has invested in the open source Community Edition is so that customers can adopt Enterprise Edition with confidence that they will not be locked into a platform that does not provide the expected value. We believe that by knowing that it is easy to leave a platform if necessary, it is easier to adopt it.
If you are considering migrating from Enterprise Edition to Community Edition, you should also consider the following:
- We hope you contact your Alfresco representative and give us the opportunity to demonstrate the value of an Enterprise Support Subscription.
- You should be prepared to support your own installation, including security fixes, dealing with any issues you might identify, and the cost of working with the open source community such that the software meets your long term needs.
- Moving to Community Edition will result in you losing Enterprise Edition features.
Here are some things to understand about the process.
- If Enterprise Edition does not have a valid license, it will go into read-only mode.
- Alfresco will not put up roadblocks to prevent customers migrating to Community Edition, but we won't provide support for the process either. You will need to rely on resources provided by the open source community such as the forums, chat, and this wiki.
- If possible, you should migrate to a newer version of Community Edition then your current version of Enterprise Edition. The database schema version should always go up.
- Our testing shows that there are sometimes problems with Enterprise-only features creating content models or properties that do not exist in Community Edition. Moving to Community Edition can cause failures when the classes that use those properties no longer exist. We fix these when we find them, but we haven't tested this process thoroughly.
- The worst case scenario would involve exporting and then importing all the repository data using OpenMigrate or the Bulk Export Tool then the Bulk Import Tool.
