Alfresco Community Edition 201704 GA Release Notes

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Alfresco Community Edition 201704 GA Release Notes

aleach
Alfresco Employee
1 11 15.8K

Alfresco Community Edition 201704 GA Release Notes

These release notes provide information for the 201704 GA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the next Generally Available release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 5.2 and Alfresco Share 5.2.  The release contains exactly the same artifacts as 201702 but with the addition of Records Management 2.5.b and SDK 3.0. Both the Alfresco Records Management Module and the SDK are now compatible with Alfresco Repository 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 201704‌.

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

This release  contains exactly the same artifacts as 201702 but with the addition of Records Management 2.5.b and SDK 3.0. 

The 5.2.0 release of Enterprise Edition, which shares most of its code with this Community Edition release went GA on the 27-February-2017.

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.

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.

Content Repository

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release.

Share

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release. The notes for the previous community release are here.

Search

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release

Governance Services

The 2.5 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 and mirrored to GitHub.

The 2.5b release of Records Management is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 5.2.

Mobile

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release.

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 

SDK

Alfresco SDK 3.0 brings a lot of new changes into the way your customizations are built, packaged, run and tested.

  • JAR Packaging
  • AMP packaging as an assembly
  • Improved compatibility - supports 4.2.x - 5.2.x and onwards
  • Easy upgrades - simply change the "alfresco-maven-plugin" version to upgrade the SDK
  • No forced parent pom - also means we have no profiles
  • All run and integration testing logic moved to the Alfresco Maven Plugin
  • Integration Testing directly on running repositories
  • Simplified archetypes
  • Hot Reloading via HotSwapAgent or JRebel

The majority of the work in SDK 3.0 has gone into moving all the previous profiles into the Alfresco Maven Plugin. The plugin now offers two new goals "alfresco:run" and "alfresco:it" for executing integration tests.

This release has been published on Maven Central.

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

  • Records Management 2.5.b
  • Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.f (SCM tag)
  • Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches for 5.2.d
  • Alfresco Share 5.2.e (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 5.2.e
  • Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.d
  • Alfresco Search Services 1.0.0
  • Google Docs 3.0.3 (SCM tag)
  • AOS Module 1.1.5
  • Aikau 1.0.101.3 (SCM tag)
  • Alfresco SDK 3.0.0

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.f.war contains version 5.2.f (build r135134-b14).
  • alfresco-5.2.f.war contains version 5.2.f (build re21f2be5-b22).
  • alfresco-share-services-5.2.e.amp contains version 5.2.e.
  • share-5.2.e.war contains version 5.2.e.
  • alfresco-solr-5.2.d.war contains version 5.2.d.
  • alfresco-search-services-1.0.0.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 Alfresco Community Edition 5.0.d release and up to the Alfresco Community Edition 201702 GA Release. This release  contains exactly the same artefacts as 201702 but with the addition of Records Management 2.5.b

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 Content 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
  • SDK: Improvements to the Alfresco SDK

Important fixes in this GA release:

  • Please refer to the RM link above under Issues Addressed.

Known Issues

  • The Alfresco Support Tools section of the Repository Administration Console is not yet localized.

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

11 Comments
douglascrp
Advanced II

This seems wrong:

  • Alfresco SDK: We are working on releasing a version of the Alfresco SDK that is compatible with the 5.2 series of Share and Repository releases.

It is ready, not being worked.

Also, the SDK is still as 2.2.0 in the artifacts versions list.

douglascrp
Advanced II

The SDK version in the Contents section is still wrong, as it says Alfresco SDK 2.2.0

douglascrp
Advanced II

I didn't know I could change documents. Nice.

It is fixed now.

jonvargas
Active Member

Hello.

Installer available at Download page points to older release yet.

Thanks for updating.

aleach
Alfresco Employee

Thanks Douglas for your updates - appreciated.

jonvargas
Active Member

Additionaly, the page mentions that RM code has been moved from Subversion to GitLab, however it point to a GitHub repo. Is this okay?

Btw, should I safely build the master branch for using it against Alfresco 201704 build? Or should I use tag V2.5.b instead? Bug fixes for V2.5.b will continue on that branch or is it completely frozen after release?

Thanks in advance.

resplin
Intermediate

Thank you for pointing out that confusion. I updated the information to clarify that the GitLab repository is being mirrored to GitHub.

I don't know the answers to your other questions. Perhaps ‌ or ‌ can help?

resplin
Intermediate

Because the artifacts in 201704 did not change from the 201702 release, we did not rebuild the installer. The changes to the release are external artifacts: RM and the SDK.

I decided that we didn't need to rebuild the artifacts for the release, but I forgot that the installer bundle contains the name of the release which has caused a lot of confusion.

Based on feedback from you and others, we will likely rebuild the installer bundle to say 201704, even though the contents won't change.

davidcognite
Senior Member

I think Richard Esplin‌ answered your question about GitLab; GitHub is the correct place to look for the released community RM code.

In terms of branches, where to look depends on what you want. We do normally release community from master, however because of the pace of development towards the next full version & the delay in getting a 2.5 community release that works with 5.2, we released from a branch this time, and hopefully only this time.

If you want something that's safe and tested against 201704, use the V2.5.b tag. It being a tag, it won't change. We're not expecting any further RM 2.5.x community releases, and hope the next release will be a 2.6.a.

The master branch is currently a 2.6-SNAPSHOT and that's where the 2.6.a build will come from when we're ready. We try to keep master pretty stable but it is where we merge all our feature work and bug fixes from all other versions on a day to day basis, so code changes frequently and some level of instability is to be expected. This version is not tested against the corresponding head/master branch of Core repo/Share community code, so there may be issues we've not picked up yet, but does include access to otherwise unreleased features, like the Governance v1 APIs. The travis CI build will give you some indication of stability, but doesn't run the full suite of tests.

So in summary, if you're building RM from source:

jonvargas
Active Member

Thanks Richard, clear now.

jonvargas
Active Member

Thank you David, clear now.