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Alfresco Community Edition 201612 GA Release

These release notes provide information for the 201612 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the first Generally Available release of Alfresco Community Edition containing Alfresco Platform 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2.

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

The latest GA release of Alfresco Community Edition is available from the Alfresco Community Edition product page.

Download this release from Alfresco Community Edition file list 201612.

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.

Goals for this Release

Our focus while developing Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 has been to strengthen Alfresco as a content platform by building a new set of REST APIs that are used by the Alfresco Application Development Framework. We are also rolling out some nice improvements to Alfresco Share, and laying the foundation for future improvements by allowing Solr 6 to be used for search indexes. This release also contains many bug fixes and library upgrades.

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

  • It has all of the features we expect to add in the 5.2 series of releases, with only a few relatively small new features added since the previous release.
  • We have received positive feedback on the last few EA releases suggesting that people are successful with them.
  • Our testing team has hit their first checkpoint of thorough testing of the 5.2.0 release of Enterprise Edition, which shares most of its code with this Community Edition release.
  • There is an upgrade path from this release to an Early Access release of Alfresco Enterprise Edition 5.2.0.

We expect this to be the first of a few GA releases that are focused on fixing bugs and polishing the product. Our goal is to continue with monthly releases.

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.

Notes on Specific Release Components

  • Solr4 is included as the default search provider in this release. Interested administrators can download and configure Alfresco Search Services which includes Solr6. There is currently no difference between the Alfresco Search Services included in Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Enterprise Edition. This releases contains alfresco-search-services-1.0-EA, which is the same artifact as was included in the Alfresco Enterprise Edition 5.2.0 EA program. It contains a handful of bug fixes and features since the alfresco-search-services-1.0.a which was included in the previous release of Alfresco Community Edition.
  • Records Management: We identified some incompatibilities between Records Management and the 5.2 series of Share and Platform releases, and therefore we removed the RM module from this release. We are working to include the Records Management module in our next release of Alfresco Community Edition.
  • Alfresco SDK: We are working on releasing a version of the Alfresco SDK that is compatible with the 5.2 series of Share and Platform releases.

Notable New Features in this Release

As a Generally Available release, the focus of this release has been on stability and not on new features.

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

Platform

Slowdown of Brute Force Attacks - REPO-1489

This release contains a simple mechanism for temporarily locking user accounts when there are multiple consecutive failed attempts at authentication. During the lockout period, all authentication attempts are denied and a warning is printed to the logs. This will significantly slow down attempts to guess passwords and allow administrators to take defensive measures. The number of failed attempts that trigger a lockout and the length of the lockout are configurable.

New REST APIs

New and updated endpoints (since Community 201611) include:

  • Permissions for a node can now be retrieved via GET /nodes/{nodeId} and GET /nodes/{nodeId}/children
  • Permissions for a node can now be updated via PUT /nodes/{nodeId}
  • Option to set an expiry date when creating a shared link with POST /shared-links

These APIs are browse-able in the REST API Explorer v1.4 (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.

See also Alfresco 5.2 REST APIs to find links to more information about the new REST APIs.

Share

No incremental updates since last month's Alfresco Community Edition 201611 EA Release.  The notes for the previous community release are here.

Search

Category faceting - SEARCH-222

It is now possible to create facets based on categories with SOLR 6.

Version store index - SEARCH-228/ SEARCH-250

A standard search usually looks at the most recent version of a document. It is now possible to tell Alfresco to index every version of a document by choosing to index the version store. This will enable the option to search all previous versions of documents. When selected, all matching versions will be returned.

 

Admin improvements

Improvements to the admin screens to enable complete Solr configuration.

 

Mobile

This Early Access Alfresco Java Client SDK contains a Java lib project to easily consume Alfresco Public REST APIs. It includes a set of APIs that allows developers to quickly build Alfresco-enabled Java & Android applications:

https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2016/11/17/alfresco-java-client-sdk 

Documentation

The documentation is currently published at docs.alfresco.com: Alfresco Community Edition

Localisation

This release includes: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese versions.  The section on Support Tools is still in English.

Feature Removals

No features have been removed in this release.

Contents

  • Alfresco Platform 5.2.d (SCM tag)
  • Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.d
  • Alfresco Share 5.2.c (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.d
  • Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.c
  • Alfresco Search Services 1.0-EA
  • Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
  • AOS Module 1.1.4
  • Aikau 1.0.99 (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco SDK 2.2.0

3rd Party Components:

  • Java 1.8.0_111
  • Tomcat 7.0.59
  • LibreOffice 5.2.1
  • 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: Improvements to Alfresco requested by open source collaborators. Most issues are linked 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: Improvements to Alfresco Share.
  • REPO: Improvements to the Alfresco ECM Repository.
  • AKU: Improvements to the Aikau UI library used by Share and other interfaces.
  • RM: Changes to Records Management.
  • SEARCH: Fixes to Search and Discovery

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.
  • MNT-16221 Infinite 302 HTTP redirect loop when using External Authentication with uppercase usernames/username case sensitivity
  • MNT-15376 NTLM authentication sometimes fails with IE10+
  • 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.)
  • MNT-16638: Folder access in 'private' sites using site path url fails versus repository url path (see also SHA-1682)
  • MNT-16517 cmSmiley Surprisedwner Aspect is missing from the folder details page
  • MNT-15838 Filmstrip view in share crashes the browser when a folder contains many large images
  • MNT-16532 DojoDependencyHandler - cached generated resources use significant amount of heap memory
  • MNT-15708 Direct Share Admins to the Repo Admin Tools

Prerequisites for manual install

  • DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.4
  • App Server: Tomcat 7
  • Java Version: JDK 8
  • LibreOffice 5.2

Known Issues

  • The Alfresco Records Management Module is known to not be compatible with Alfresco Platform 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2. We expect to include a compatible Records Management Module in the next release of Alfresco Community Edition.
  • The Alfresco SDK compatible with the Alfresco 5.2 series of releases is still under development.
  • Though publicly available, the documentation is still under development. It is particularly missing information about Alfresco Search Services and Solr6.
  • The Alfresco Support Tools section of the Repository Administration Console is not yet localized.
  • ACE-5661: CAS is not working in some scenarios. This is expected to be fixed in the next release. 

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

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