Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 Release Notes

[angelborroy]

Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 is our latest Open Source software release that has improvements to Alfresco Content Services which accelerate development of business solutions. With Alfresco Community Edition 7.1, Alfresco continues to enable open source communities, customers and partners to realize value from their most important information.

Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 delivers functionality to enable developers and customers to customise the product and extend through integrations. Customers can purchase an upgrade from Alfresco Community Edition to Alfresco Content Services 7.1 for advanced features and support of our for-fee Alfresco extensions and applications.

Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 shares much of its code with Alfresco Content Services 7.1 release. This release contains core functionality enhancements completed from the release of Alfresco Content Services 7.1. In addition this release contains an updated stack of supported databases, operating systems and platforms providing up to date support.

The release readiness testing team have successfully completed their regression testing cycles to help give you confidence. 

Goals for this Release

The main goal of this release is to enable customers to create solutions. As Alfresco and Hyland have a continuing commitment to Open Source, we value your feedback.

 Use Cases

• Provide new features to allow partners and customers to create solutions.
• Support customers using the Open Source version of our major products and components.
• Support partners doing open source development for customisations for their customers.
• Support customers in open source development.
• Assisting partners and customers to migrate customisations from previous releases to Alfresco Community Edition 7.1.

When we released Community Edition 7.0 in March, we advised that we changed the way the Community should raise issues. Please report issues with this Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 using GitHub Issues or by using the discussion tools in the Alfresco Hub for Alfresco Community Edition.

Other feedback on Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 can be provided by emailing Community Edition@alfresco.com.

Installation

Alfresco Community Edition 7.1 is available as a distribution zip file for manual installation, or it can be installed using an Ansible playbook (Linux only) for non-containerized environments. It is also available as a set of Docker images that can be deployed in containerized environments using docker-compose or Helm charts (for Kubernetes).

You can find a summary of these options here:

https://www.alfresco.com/products/community/download

Download ZIP Distribution file from:

https://download.alfresco.com/cloudfront/release/community/7.1.0.1-build-2669/alfresco-content-servi...

Upgrading from previous releases

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous releases of Alfresco Community Edition 7.1. There are some steps that should be reviewed and planned before you upgrade. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the guidance below and plan your upgrade.

Please refer to the detailed Upgrading documentation, including Alfresco Content Services upgrade paths.

In particular, please ensure that the following steps are completed before you start your upgrade process:

• Ensure that you have a functional backup of your Alfresco Repository and your Alfresco Database, before starting the upgrade process
• Download and run the Alfresco Extension Inspector to understand which customisation or library items need to be reviewed or updated to support the upgrade
• Review all new and deprecated features included in this release note
• Review and implement the new Supported stack options, and update as necessary for the new deployment
• Apply the recommended database optimisation patch for larger implementations (see the upgrade documentation for details)

Specific Release Components

Content Repository

• New REST API Endpoints:
• New endpoints available for Direct Access URLs
  POST '/nodes/{nodeId}/request-direct-access-url'
  POST '/nodes/{nodeId}/renditions/{renditionId}/request-direct-access-url'
  POST '/nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/request-direct-access-url'
  POST '/deleted-nodes/{nodeId}/request-direct-access-url'
  POST '/deleted-nodes/{nodeId}/renditions/{renditionId}/request-direct-access-url'

REST API Explorer

REST API Explorer is 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 (7.1.0.1) is available on GitHub - rest-api-explorer to navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints.

Alfresco Share

The latest release of Share is 7.1.0.

Search Services

Alfresco Search Services for Community Edition is 2.0 remains the latest release. Solr 6 is the underlying search engine for 2.0. Solr 4 will continue to be available for ACS 5.2 users to facilitate upgrades.

Alfresco Governance Services

AGS 7.1.0 is the latest release and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.1.

Alfresco Mobile

Alfresco Mobile Workspace is 1.1 and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.1.

SDK

The latest release of the Alfresco in-process SDK is SDK 4.3, which is compatible with Alfresco Community Edition 7.1.   

The latest release of the Alfresco Event SDK for out-of-process events (SDK v5.1), which is compatible with Alfresco Community Edition 7.1.

Alfresco Extension Inspector

This optional utility helps partners and customers better understand the customisations in their existing deployments. The Alfresco Extension Inspector is a utility for AMP inspection for Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Content Services 5.2.7, 6.2.2, 7.x releases. The inspector is recommended for use before installing new versions of our product to help expose any issues that might impeded success.

The alfresco-extension-inspector is a tool that scans and validates an Alfresco extension (amp or jar) against an alfresco.war file. The tool parses an extension and generates a report on possible overrides, discouraged usage of nonpublic API, Alfresco's 3rd-party libraries and incompatible libraries.

To download Alfresco Extension Inspector from Nexus click here or from GitHub.

Documentation

The documentation has been refreshed for this release:
https://docs.alfresco.com/content-services/community/

Localization

The Content Repository supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Simplified Chinese.

Share supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese.

Alfresco Mobile app 1.1 supports French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch only.

Feature Removals

• Removal of 3rd party libraries
• Apache PDFBox

Contents

• Alfresco Content Repository 7.1.0-ga (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Share 7.1.0 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Content Application 2.6.0 (SCM_tag)
• Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 7.0.0 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Search Services 2.0.2 (SCM tag)
• Google Docs 3.2.1 (SCM tag)
• AOS Module 1.4.0 (SCM tag)

Docker Images are available on Docker Hub

• alfresco/alfresco-content-repository-community:7.1.0
• alfresco/alfresco-transform-core-aio:2.5.3
• alfresco/alfresco-share:7.1.0.1
• alfresco/alfresco-search-services:2.0.2
• alfresco/alfresco-activemq:5.16.1

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. 

3rd Party Components installed in the docker containers

• CentOS 7.9 x64
• Open JDK 11.0.12
• Tomcat 9.0.52
• PostgreSQL 13.1

Library Upgrades

A number of underlying libraries have been updated in both the Repository and Share.

• Spring has been upgraded to 5.3.9
• Camel has been upgraded to 3.7.4

Issues Addressed

The MNT (Maintenance) issues addressed in this release are available in JIRA. 

Issues Addressed.

Known Issues

• #799 Wrong sintax in DB patch index props for MySQL/MariaDB

YouTube videos

• Alfresco SOLR Communication Modes
• Alfresco Search Enterprise 3.0
• Alfresco Java SDK (REST API)
• Alfresco Java SDK (Events API)