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Elite Collaborator
Elite Collaborator

Alfresco Community Edition 201609 EA Release

These release notes provide information for the 201609 Early Access release of Alfresco Community Edition.

Early access releases are intended for interested parties to test new features, provide feedback, and collaborate on development. This release is not meant to replace the previous generally available release.

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous version of Alfresco Community Edition. Backup your Alfresco alf_data directory and database before upgrading, and read the documentation.

Installation

Download this release from the Alfresco Community Edition file list 201609-EA

For download and installation instructions, refer to the Download and Install Alfresco page.

The Alfresco supplied installers will install all you need to run Alfresco on your machine; which includes JDK, Tomcat, SOLR, and LibreOffice. It also includes interfaces and extensions such as Share, the Google Docs integration, and the AOS module.

Notes:

  • JVM memory defaults to half system memory, minimum of 2GB.
  • Latest OS patches are always recommended.
  • The repository must be switched from jBPM to Activiti before upgrading to 5.1 from previous releases (see 'Feature Removals', below).

Goals for this Release

Most of the work for the 5.2 Alfresco Platform is focused on building a new set of REST APIs. These new APIs are experimental and likely to change, so they require us to label this release as an Early Access build. We are looking forward to feedback on how the APIs are structured and how they function. This release also contains bug fixes, a few new features in Alfresco Share, and an upgrade to Records Management.

Please report issues with this release in the issue tracker. You can collaborate on this release in the Alfresco forums. Other feedback can be provided by emailing community@alfresco.com.

We plan to continue with monthly EA release while we move toward our next major release of Alfresco One. It is currently undecided whether that release will be called Alfresco One 5.2, or whether we will give it a different name.

Notable New Features

The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 lists all the features in the 5.2 line of Alfresco releases.

Platform

New REST APIs

New and updated endpoints include:

  • /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/*
  • /nodes/{nodeId}/lock and /nodes/{nodeId}/unlock
  • /queries/people and /queries/sites
  • /search

These APIs are browse-able in the REST API Explorer v1.2 (GitHub - alfresco-rest-api-explorer) to navigate the details. This is included in the SDK, or can be installed by adding the WAR to your Alfresco install and configuring CORS.

Share

Flexible Site Dashboards

Site Managers now have greater control over the features within their sites. See SHA-1394.

  • Optional Site Dashboards: Site Managers can customize a site and remove the Site Dashboard when it is not required
  • Home page configuration: a Site Manager can pick any Site feature to be the initial page that will be displayed to visitors

 

Easy Site Deletion

Site Managers can now easily delete a site directly from the site configuration options drop-down menu. See SHA-325.

 

Live Search in the current Site

Users can restrict the Live Search results to display only the results from the site they are in, the selection is carried through to the full search results page. See SHA-1521.

 

Activities Dashlet uses Group Name

The Site Activities Dashlet now displays the group name instead of the group ID. See SHA-1593.

 

Records Management

The 2.5.a release of Records Management includes bug fixes, architectural improvements, and a new testing framework. Specifically:

  • This release concludes the architectural changes started in 2.4 to build the Enterprise RM module on top of the Community Edition core, overlaid with a small number of proprietary features to enable easy administration in large organizations.
  • The team still needs to separate the Enterprise tests from the Community tests so that the tests can be included in the public repository.
  • The source code has been migrated from Subversion to Git, stored in our GitLab repository.

 

Feature Removals

No features have been removed in this release.

Contents

  • Alfresco Platform 5.2.b (SCM tag)
  • Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.b
  • Alfresco Share 5.2.a (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.b
  • Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.a
  • Alfresco Records Management 2.5.a
  • Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
  • AOS Module 1.1.3
  • Aikau 1.0.81 (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco SDK 2.2.0

3rd Party Components:

  • Java 1.8.0_65
  • Tomcat 7.0.59
  • LibreOffice 4.4.5
  • PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • ImageMagick 6.9.1.10

Issues Addressed

This release contains all bug fixes since the Community Edition 5.0.d release.

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 5.1 releases to get a complete list of issues addressed since the previous GA release (5.0.d). Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.

  • ALF: All fixes to Alfresco requested by the open source community were copied to another project to get assigned to a team.
  • ACE: Improvements to Alfresco requested by product management.
  • MNT: Fixes to Alfresco requested by customers (many are private).
  • SHA: there were no changes in the Share project for this release, they were done in MNT.
  • REPO: Fixes to the Alfresco Repository
  • AKU: there were no changes to Akau for this release.
  • RM: Changes to Records Management.

Important fixes since the last GA release:

  • MNT-16259: Some installs need to change the 'admin' user password after upgrading. See SA-8.
  • MNT-15795: CAS authentication via the external auth subsystem no longer works. This issue contains a patch.
  • ALF-21607: Problems with SSO via Kerberos. This issue contains a patch to a number of related issues.
  • SHA-1717 The "Hide Getting Started" panel settings icon was missing.
  • ALF-21398: Advanced Search Yields No Results When Using Hyphens in Custom Property Values (Thank you to Cory Solovewicz for helping us to track it down.)

Prerequisites for manual install

  • DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • App Server: Tomcat 7
  • Java Version: JDK 8
  • LibreOffice 4.4

Known Issues

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

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