Alfresco Community Edition 201711 EA

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• Alfresco Community Edition 201711 EA Release
• Release Notes
• Installation
• Goals for this Release
• Notes on Specific Release Components
• Notable New Features in this Release
• Content Repository
• Code Organization and Package Names
• Heartbeat
• New REST APIs
• REST API EXPLORER
• Bug Fixes
• Share
• Search Services
• Governance Services
• Mobile
• SDK
• Documentation
• Localisation
• Feature Removals
• Contents
• Artifacts
• Prerequisites for Manual Install
• Issues Addressed
• Known Issues

Alfresco Community Edition 201711 EA Release

Release Notes

These release notes provide information for the 201711 EA release of Alfresco Community Edition.

This is the first Early Access release of Alfresco Community Edition containing the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0. This release contains all fixes completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services 5.2.1 in July of 2017 through November of 2017.

Even though this release does not include any backwards incompatible changes, we have planned significant architectural evolution for the 6.0 family of releases.

Due to end-of-year holidays, we have not yet decided if we will have a December release or if the next release will be in January 2018.

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.

Installation

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

Download this release from Alfresco Community Edition 201711 EA file list‌.

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

We plan significant architectural improvements in the 6.0 family of releases, but this release does not yet differ significantly from the 5.2 releases of Alfresco Community Edition. Some components of this release still use the 5.x version numbering because they do not yet have significant changes from the previous releases. These components could likely be used successfully with previous GA releases in order to take advantage of bug fixes.

This release allows us to ship the incremental work that we have available alongside the initial refactoring of the code base to support future changes. This is also the first release cut from our new build tooling and the repositories in GitHub.‌

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

The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 6.0 lists all the features in the 6.0 line of Alfresco releases.

Content Repository

 

Code Organization and Package Names

The repository source code has been migrated from Subversion to Git. We are releasing from our new code structures, including public GitHub repositories. As part of this process:

• The code base was split into smaller projects that produce intermediate artifacts with their own versioning.
• The naming of the artifacts changed. The top-level artifacts include "community" to clarify that they are open source (the proprietary artifacts include "content-services" in their names).
• The Early Access artifacts are built from a separate POM that includes an EA in the names.

Heartbeat

Instances of Alfresco Content Services sends a "heartbeat" status report that Alfresco Software uses to make decisions about those products. We have been improving the heartbeat to report more detailed information so that we can evolve the product in ways that provide the most value to our customers. As part of this process, we are including the new heartbeat in Alfresco Community Edition so that we can better understand how our open source users interact with the product. This will allow us to include the needs of our open source community in our decision making, and better measure the value of our investment in our open source products.

The new heartbeat service will replace the previous "Tracking Pixel" method of Community Edition Usage Tracking‌. It adds a global property "heartbeat.enabled" which is currently set to false and disables the heartbeat functionality.

Over the long term, we plan to make this information available to the administrators of Alfresco Community Edition so that they can better understand the usage of their repositories.

New REST APIs

New Endpoints (since ACS 5.2.1 and Alfresco Community Edition 201707) include:

• Audit
  • GET /audit-applications   -   List audit applications
  • GET /audit-applications/{auditApplicationId}   -   Get audit application info
  • PUT /audit-applications/{auditApplicationId}   -   Update audit application info
  • GET /audit-applications/{auditApplicationId}/audit-entries   -   List audit entries for an audit application
  • DELETE /audit-applications/{auditApplicationId}/audit-entries   -   Permanently delete audit entries for an audit application
  • GET /audit-applications/{auditApplicationId}/audit-entries/{auditEntryId}   -   Get audit entry
  • DELETE /audit-applications/{auditApplicationId}/audit-entries/{auditEntryId}   -   Permanently delete an audit entry
  • GET /nodes/{nodeId}/audit-entries   -   List audit entries for a node
• Avatar
  • GET /people/{personId}/avatar   -   Get avatar image
  • PUT /people/{personId}/avatar   -   Update avatar image
  • DELETE /people/{personId}/avatar   -   Delete avatar image

REST API EXPLORER

An updated release of the REST API Explorer (v6.0.0-ea) 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.

Bug Fixes

We also addressed a number of bugs since the release of Alfresco Community Edition 201707.

Share

Bug fixes only.

Search Services

No incremental updates since Alfresco Community Edition 201707 GA Release.

More details are available in the blog post Alfresco Search Services 1.1.0

Governance Services

The latest version of the RM module (2.6.b) has been tested against Alfresco Content Repository 5.2.g and Share 5.2.f, but there are no known incompatibilities with the Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.a, please let us know if you find any. Additional details are available in the release blog post: Records Management 2.6.b. The next release, 2.6.c, is expected shortly and will be the last in the 2.6.x stream before we start working on 2.7.a (which will also target 5.2.x).

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

The Alfresco SDK is not yet updated with the new code locations. For more details, see More of Alfresco Content Services on GitHub. The support for 6.0.0-ea version in Alfresco SDK will be added in next releases of Alfresco 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 feature removals were planned for this release. Due to concerns about protocol security, it is likely that future releases will remove CIFS/SMBv1 and NTLMv1. For more details see: https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2017/11/03/moving-from-smb-to-webdav?sr=search&sea...‌.

Contents

• Alfresco Content Repository 6.0.0-ea (SCM tag)
• Solr 4.10.3 with Alfresco patches 6.6 (https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-solr4/releases/tag/alfresco-solr4-parent-6.6)
• Alfresco Share 5.2.f (SCM tag)
• Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 6.1 (SCM tag) (See "Known Issues" below.)
• Alfresco Web Quick Start and Web Editor 5.2.f
• Alfresco Search Services 1.1.0
• Google Docs 3.0.4.2 (SCM tag)
• AOS Module 1.1.7
  •    Aikau 1.0.101.3 (SCM tag)

3rd Party Components:

• Java 1.8.0_131
• Tomcat 7.0.82
• LibreOffice 5.2.1
• PostgreSQL 9.4.12
• ImageMagick 7.0.5

Artifacts

• alfresco-content-services-community-full-installer-6.0.0-ea-win-x64.exe

• alfresco-content-services-community-full-installer-6.0.0-ea-linux-x64.bin

• alfresco-content-services-community-full-distribution-6.0.0-ea.zip

• alfresco-file-transfer-receiver-6.1.zip  (See "Known Issues" below.)

• alfresco-solr4-distribution-6.6.zip

• alfresco-search-services-1.1.0.zip

Prerequisites for Manual Install

• DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.12
• 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.

The issues addressed specifically in this release are available in JIRA projects for the components of this release. Please look at the previous 6.0 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's products requested by open source collaborators. Most issues are linked to another project to get assigned to a team.
• 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 EA release:

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

Known Issues

• The Alfresco SDK is not yet compatible with the this release.
• The Alfresco File Transfer Receiver is not yet compatible with the this release REPO-3040.

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