Alfresco Community Edition 201508 EA Release
These release notes provide information for the 201508 Early Access release of Alfresco Community Edition.
Early access releases are intended for interested parties to test new features, provide feedback, and collaborate on development. This release is not meant to replace the previous Generally Available release.
Care should be taken when upgrading any previous Alfresco Community version. Backup your Alfresco alf_data and database before upgrading, and read the documentation.
Release Details
Goals for this Release
This is the first release of the 5.1 code line of the Alfresco Platform and Alfresco Share. We want to get feedback on stability and quality. Custom Model Management is a significant new feature, and the area where we would most appreciate feedback.
With this release, we have evolved how we are packaging Alfresco, and we are differentiating between Early Access and Generally Available releases. Our reasoning behind these changes are explained in a blog post from June. We would also appreciate feedback on this topic.
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.
Notable New Features
(Issue number at http://issues.alfresco.com)
- Alfresco Share now lives in a separate repository from the Alfresco Platform, and has its own life cycle.
- Support for JAR extension modules
- Modules can be packaged as bare JARs on the classpath instead of having to be wrapped in AMPs and overlaid on the WAR. Examples are in the SDK.
- A new Alfresco Share based user interface to allow business analysts to define and deploy content models for use by Alfresco Share end users. No need to write or even see XML files. Models can be deployed automatically without a server restart.
- Allow all users to see site visibility settings (Public/Moderated/Private) to avoid misunderstanding around permissions when sharing content.
- Added 'Take Ownership' action to Share (SHA-244)
- Allows authorised users and administrators to take ownership of content to allow further management and administration of the content.
- User defined start page after login to Share (SHA-981)
- User can control the location the navigate to after first login or via the 'home' link based their individual preference
- New Share action providing the ability to extract ZIP and ACP (Alfresco Content Package) files for bulk ingestion of files or moving content between Alfresco instances
- Improve Repository Admin Console
- Add Delete, Force Delete, Take Ownership, Revert Permissions, Restore actions for nodes and Delete action for properties.
- PDFjs (HTML5 document viewer component in Share) upgrade to 1.1.125
- Improved stability, performance and compatibility for document previews.
The page dedicated to Alfresco Community Edition 5.1 lists all the features in the 5.1 line of Alfresco releases.
Feature Removals
Contents
Upgraded 3rd Party Components
- Java 1.8.0_51
- LibreOffice 4.4.5
- PostgreSQL 9.4.4
- ImageMagick 6.9.1
Issues Addressed
This release contains all bug fixes since the Community Edition 5.0.d release.
Important fixes:
- MNT-14125: Errors after upgrading to 5.0.
- ALF-21333: Problems with JDK 7. Note that we addressed the build problem so this release should work with Java 7. However, we are only testing on Java 8.
The individual JIRA projects that contain the components of this release can be queried to get a complete list of issues addressed in this release since the previous GA release (5.0.d). Note that JIRA behaves inconsistently with these queries when you are not logged in.
- ALF: Fixes to Alfresco requested by the open source community (often copied to another project to get assigned to a team).
- ACE: Improvements to Alfresco requested by product management.
- MNT: Fixes to Alfresco requested by customers.
- SHA: Fixes for Alfresco Share
- AKU: Fixes to the Aikau UI library that Share uses.
Installation
Download this release from the 201508-EA File List.
Further instructions are with the GA releases on 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, Share, Google Docs integration, LibreOffice, Sharepoint module etc.
Note: JVM memory now defaults to half system memory, minimum of 2GB.
Note: latest OS patches are always recommended.
Prerequisites for manual install
- DB: MySQL 5.6 or PostgreSQL 9.4.4
- App Server: Tomcat 7.0.59
- Java Version: JDK 8 (installer shipped with JDK 1.8.0_51)
- LibreOffice 4.4
Known Issues
- This release is an Early Access and has not yet been thoroughly tested.
- There is no updated documentation for this release.
- New strings in this release have not yet been localized.
- Records Management has not yet been tested.
- This release was built to be compatible with Java 7, but this has not yet been tested.
Please refer to the Alfresco issue tracker for other known issues in Community 5.1.
Release Notes
Community Edition
Early Access Releases
5.1
