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Champ on-the-rise
Champ on-the-rise

 

These release notes provide information for the 201901 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the GA release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 6.1.2-ga. This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services through January of 2019, including a number of fixes contributed by the open source community.

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous version of Alfresco Community Edition. Before upgrading, test that you have a functional backup of your Alfresco Repository, and read the documentation.

Goals for this Release

The main goal of this release is to get feedback on our latest GA release. You can leave that feedback in comments on this page, or by Reporting an Issue.

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

Notable New Features in this Release

ActiveMQ:

Alfresco Benchmark Framework:

Java 11 support

  • ACS is now runnable with OpenJDK 11.0.1. It still remains compatible with JDK 1.8

Anonymous usage metrics

Alfresco Content Services collects anonymised usage metrics through the heartbeat component. This means we do not store collect or store any information that links to an identifiable person.These metrics are sent based on a pre-configured time period and include: version information, numbers of users and groups, numbers of models, aspects and types, whether smart folders are enabled or not as well as the JVM total, max and free memory size. On the receiving side, we detect the country where the data is sent from, but we do not store the IP address of reports coming from our open source products.

  1.       acs.repository.configuration -> REPO-3597
  2.       acs.repository.info -> REPO-3594
  3.       acs.repository.usage.system -> REPO-3595
  4.       acs.repository.renditions -> REPO-3681
  5.       acs.repository.usage.sessions -> REPO-3599

Alfresco is using this data to better target new features and their prioritization to actual usage patterns. We also track the adoption of new versions and features in our install base.  To see exactly what is being sent, feel free to look at the log output generated by

log4j.logger.org.alfresco.heartbeat.datasender.internal.HBDataConsumer=DEBUG

If you wish to deactivate this data transmission, then you just need to add

heartbeat.enabled=false

to your configuration, either as value in alfresco-global.properties or as part of the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in the docker-compose file.

Release Contents

  •        Alfresco Content Repository 6.1.2-ga (SCM tag)
  •        Alfresco Share 6.1.0-RC3 (SCM tag)
  •        Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 6.2.1 (SCM tag)
  •        Alfresco Search Services 1.3.0-RC2 (SCM tag)
  •        Google Docs 3.1.0 (SCM tag)
  •        AOS Module 1.2.2 (SCM tag)
  •        alfresco-pdf-renderer 1.1

3rd Party Components installed in the docker containers:

  •        CentOS 7.5
  •        Java 11.0.1
  •        Tomcat 8.5.34
  •        LibreOffice 5.4.6
  •        PostgreSQL 10.1
  •        ImageMagick 7.0.7-27

Additional docker containers used in docker-compose file:

  •        docker.io/library/postgres:10.1

Artifacts

o   alfresco-content-services-community-distribution-6.1.2-ga.zip

o   alfresco-file-transfer-receiver-6.2.1.zip

o   alfresco-search-services-1.3.0-RC2.zip

Content Repository

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.

REST API Explorer

REST API Explorer is now 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).

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (6.1.0-RC4) is available on GitHub - rest-api-explorer to navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints. This version includes a new API definition for Alfresco Insight Engine.

Share/

The latest version of Share is 6.1.0.-RC3. For further details please consult the list of share issues fixed in this release at the bottom of the page under Issues Addressed.

Search Services

The latest version of Alfresco Search Services is 1.3-RC2.

Governance Services

AGS 3.0 is the latest GA edition but compatibility with ACS 6.1 is targeted at AGS 3.0.1 in the March 2019 time frame. Additional details are available in the release blog post: Alfresco Governance Services 3.0.

Mobile

The latest version of Content Services for Android is version 1.8.5 which contents a number of minor improvements and fixes.

The next version of Content Services for iOS will be version 2.7 will support iPhone X and is expected to be released in February 2019.

SDK

A beta version of SDK4.0 has been release tested for compatibility with ACS 6.0. SDK 4.0 GA will be released in parallel with ACS6.1 Enterprise GA release, once testing has been completed.

Documentation

The documentation has been refreshed for this release. 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. We are working on additional localisations into Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Polish and Czech. Soon we will also be offering User Help and a Getting Started guide in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.

Feature Removals and Deprecations

TransformService and RenditionService:

  • All Java APIs related to TransformService and RenditionService have been deprecated; the ability to perform arbitrary transformations will be phased out as our new Out of Process Transform Service takes effect. Renditions can be triggered using the existing repository REST API but will be processed asynchronously using the new services.

Installation

Alfresco Community Edition is available both as a distribution zip file containing the war files and as docker images that are deployed using docker-compose.

The Alfresco Community Edition docker images are available on DockerHub.

To run this GA release with docker:

  1.       You need to have Docker installed on your machine
  2.       Make sure that the ports 5432, 5672, 8080, 8082, 8083, 8161, 61616, 61613 are available on your machine
  3.    Get the docker-compose.yml file from this release tag.
  4.    Run docker-compose up
  5.    Check that everything starts up with the browser: http://localhost:8082/alfresco and http://localhost:8082/api-explorer and http://localhost:8080/share and http://localhost:8083/solr/ and http://localhost:8161/admin

Please refer to the "Docker-compose & Kubernetes" instructions on Github - acs-community-packaging for additional details. See also the notes below (Dockerized Deployment) that covers acs-community-deployment.

Notes:

  •        The latest GA release of Alfresco Community Edition is available from the Alfresco Community Edition product page .
  •        It is recommended to have at least 8GB of RAM available on the system.
  •        Latest OS patches are always recommended.

Dockerized deployment

This release comes with a set of docker images instead of a GUI installer. These docker images produce a deployment that is more closely aligned with production best practices than the previous installers were capable of creating. The docker-compose and helm charts can be found in a separate project acs-community-deployment and for this release the changes were tagged with 6.1.2-ga.

To configure Alfresco Community Edition, it is recommended to add -Dkey=value properties to the JAVA_OPTS environment variable in the docker-compose.yml file. In this EA release, all the data is still stored inside the docker containers. This is sufficient for test and development purposes. For production like environments however, it is recommended to mount locations on the host machine into the containers so that all the data (content store, DB and SOLR indexes) gets stored on the host.

Prerequisites for Manual Install

  •        DB: MySQL or PostgreSQL
  •        Apache Tomcat
  •        Java JDK
  •        LibreOffice
  •        ImageMagick

You should use the same versions as we have in the docker containers (see above).

Issues Addressed

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.

  •       ALF: Improvements to Alfresco's products requested by open source collaborators. Most issues are linked to another project to get assigned to a team.
  •       REPO: Improvements to the Alfresco Content Repository.
  •       RM: Changes to Records Management.
  •        SHA : Improvements in Share.

We also addressed a number of bugs since the release of Alfresco Community Edition 201808.

Known Issues

  • ·   Due to the changes to the RenditionService the Media Management AMP is not supported yet.

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

28 Comments
dshookowsky
Confirmed Champ
Confirmed Champ
We have bundled ActiveMQ now with the repository to handle raw events

I know the Docker version has an ActiveMQ image, but if you're installing from a zip, do you need to also install ActiveMQ from a separate binary or is it in the community packaging somehow?

janv
Employee
Employee

Hi Daniel,

Yes,  you will need to run an instance of ActiveMQ Broker. See also: Configuring ActiveMQ | Alfresco Documentation 

You can either use docker Docker Hub  & GitHub - Alfresco/alfresco-docker-activemq: ActiveMQ image for Alfresco DBP 

Or download and install from Apache ActiveMQ.

Regards,

Jan

peter_horvath
Champ on-the-rise
Champ on-the-rise

Only you forgot to mention, where to download alfresco-file-transfer-receiver-6.2.1.zip ... your search service zip I could find in your nexus...

I am not sure, it is unprofessionality from your side, or some black marketing, but none of them helps me to convince my bosses to buy an enterprise product.

kgastaldo
Star Collaborator
Star Collaborator

Hi Peter - Can you clarify - what is missing? And from where? 

It looks like the link you mentioned is available on the "thank you for downloading community edition" page. Was that not the case for you?

maxodoble
Confirmed Champ
Confirmed Champ

Where can i find the download of the AOS 1.2.2 amp Module???

Why didn't you publish a "release files" page as existed for all previous releases and was super helpful for finding all relevant files for a release?

Max

afaust
Legendary Innovator
Legendary Innovator

I specifically asked that question at the DevCon session on the new transformation service. Jan Vonka‌ stated that Alfresco will have to look at how Community Edition will be supported / covered in the future and that there will be no way around Alfresco supporting transformations for Community Edition in the future.

Bear in mind that - as always - all the relevant interfaces for the new Transformation Service are part of the Alfresco core, and as such available even in Community Edition, with a compatibility layer for the old-school transformers. It is just the queue-based implementation that is currently Enterprise-only. There is nothing preventing any member of the community from adding a similar implementation for Community Edition if Alfresco may take their time in doing so or if they excessively limit its usefulness.

afaust
Legendary Innovator
Legendary Innovator

Or set the global property messaging.subsystem.autoStart=false if you have no plans at all to use any of the functionalities / features that need ActiveMQ.

Jan Vonka‌ You might want to tell Engineering that it is good industry practice to configure / implement timeouts when trying to connect to remote systems. Currently, the repository startup just hangs when no ActiveMQ is available, instead of giving up after maybe a minute and properly complaining with WARN/ERROR logging.

maxodoble
Confirmed Champ
Confirmed Champ

No one, really???

I am simply not able to find any link to the AOS Download files for this release anywhere.

Is it too much to ask for a proper release file summary, where we can download all files that are relevant for this release?

I don't think that every alfresco customer is already using the docker and helm and whatnot shenanigans,

and the zip file install method is still valid according to the docs?

So i kindly ask again: Please give us links to all relevant files for this "GA" Release.

Just take a look at the release files pages for the previous releases, they worked perfectly 🙂

Please!

Thanks

maxodoble
Confirmed Champ
Confirmed Champ

Oh,

are the features that require ActiveMQ documented/listed anywhere?

By reading the release notes i got the impression that ActiveMQ is now mandatory for ACS?

Thanks,

Max

afaust
Legendary Innovator
Legendary Innovator

I don't know if you have read fully through this page, but they actually provide a link to the Community Edition product page where you can download the distribution ZIP, Search Services and File Transfer Receiver (I haven't checked if the distribution ZIP includes AOS)