Alfresco Community Edition 201701 GA Release Notes

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• Alfresco Community Edition 201701 GA Release
• Installation
• Goals for this Release
• Notes on Specific Release Components
• Notable New Features in this Release
• Branding
• Platform
• REST API Explorer
• Share
• Search
• Mobile
• Documentation
• Localisation
• Feature Removals
• Contents
• Artifacts
• Prerequisites for Manual Install
• Issues Addressed
• Known Issues

Alfresco Community Edition 201701 GA Release

These release notes provide information for the 201701 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the next 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 201701‌.

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.  This release builds on last month's initial Community Edition GA release.  This release contains bug fixes and library upgrades with focus on improving stability rather than adding new features.

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.
• We have received positive feedback on the last few releases suggesting that people are successful with them.
• Our testing team has hit their second 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 penultimate 5.2 Community GA release that is focused on fixing bugs and polishing the product before we return to new development. Our goal is to continue with monthly releases.

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.

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.
• 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 expect to have a compatible version of the Records Management Module available at the end of February 2017.
• 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.

Branding

You will see some new branding in the product. This is a step in preparing new branding for a future release of our Enterprise products. This will affect some artifact naming, log messages, error messages and administration screens.

Platform

REST API Explorer

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (v5.2.e) is available (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 public REST APIs to find links to more information about the new REST APIs.

Share

No incremental updates since last month's Alfresco Community Edition 201612 GA Release.  The notes for the previous community release are here.

Search

Bug fixes only

Mobile

We provide an Early Access release of an Alfresco Java Client SDK which 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.

Feature Removals

No features have been removed in this release.

Contents

• Alfresco Platform 5.2.e (SCM tag)
• Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.d
• Alfresco Share 5.2.d (SCM tag)
• Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.e
• Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.d
• Alfresco Search Services 1.0.b
• Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
• AOS Module 1.1.5
• Aikau 1.0.101.3 (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

Artifacts

• alfresco-platform-5.2.e.war contains version 5.2.e (build r134428-b13).
• alfresco-5.2.e.war contains version 5.2.e (build r135134-b14).
• alfresco-share-services-5.2.d.amp contains version 5.2.d.
• share-5.2.d.war contains version 5.2.d.
• alfresco-solr-5.2.d.war contains version 5.2.d.
• alfresco-search-services-1.0.b.zip built.

Prerequisites for Manual Install

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

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 Discover

Important fixes in this GA release:

• MNT-16259: Some installs need to change the 'admin' user password after upgrading. See SA-8.
• ACE-5661: CAS is not working in some scenarios.

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 have a compatible version of the Records Management Module available at the end of February 2017.
• 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.
• MNT-17113: Preview not updated after new versions, AOS and manual upload. Issue contains a patch.
• ACE-5753: CMIS browser binding root URL is broken
• ACE-5748: Hibernate errors: Unusable connection proxy was constructed

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