Alfresco Content Services 7.2 Release Notes｜March 25, 2022

Alfresco Content Services 7.2 Release Notes

Alfresco Content Services 7.2 is software update release with improvements to Alfresco Content Services to accelerate use and development for customer solutions for PaaS, Cloud or on-prem deployment. With Alfresco Content Services 7.2, Alfresco continues to enable open-source communities, customers and partners to deliver a highly scalable Content Store with numerous applications, connectivity and solutions. 

Alfresco Content Services 7.2 delivers functionality to enable customers and developers to install Alfresco created solutions and to customise the product through integrations, APIs and SDKs. 

Customers can purchase an upgrade from Alfresco Community Edition to Alfresco Content Services 7.2 to enable advanced features and purchase Alfresco applications, connectivity, and solutions. 

This release contains enhancements completed for the release of Alfresco Content Services 7.2. In addition, this release contains an updated stack of supported databases, operating systems and platforms providing up to date support. All hot fixes and patches from Alfresco Content Services 7.0.0 onwards are included in this release. 

Alfresco’s release readiness testing team have successfully completed their regression and upgrade testing cycles to help give you confidence to upgrade to this release. Alfresco Content Services 7.2 shares much of its code with Alfresco Community Edition and adds significant functionality in the release. 

• Alfresco Content Services 7.2 Release Notes

  • Goals for this Release 

  • Highlights of new features include: 

  • Support for Alfresco Content Services 7.2 

  • Installation

    • Azure and Glacier Connector Customers 

    • Upgrading from previous releases 

  • Developer Guide 

  • Deprecations 

  • Library Upgrades 

  • Supported Platforms 

  • Upgraded integration artifacts 

  • Specific Release Components

    • REST API Explorer 

    • Alfresco Share 

    • Search Services 

    • Alfresco Governance Services 

    • Alfresco Mobile 

    • SDK 

    • Alfresco Extension Inspector 

  • Documentation 

  • Localisation 

  • Issues Addressed 

  • Known Issues 

Goals for this Release 

The goal of the Alfresco Content Services 7.2 release is to serve customers evolving needs with Cloud content storage and increased flexibility of their environments. All fixes and new features are forward compatible to aid adoption and future upgrades with our platform. 

Highlights of new features include

• Support for Direct Access URLs: Enables the acceleration of the local download of content to aid distributed content repos in customer environments, cloud deployments. This allows customers greater flexibility and content storage capabilities for highly distributed deployments. 

• New storage capabilities for Cloud integrations: Alfresco has built a new Cloud storage layer to make managing content easier for AWS and Azure customers.

  • This allows content to easily be located in AWS by adding support for AWS Glacier natively in the S3 connector to allow storage admins to configure their storage and retention policies as needed by their business. 

  • This allows content to easily be located in Azure by adding support for Azure Cool and Cold storage Blobs natively in the Azure connector to allow storage admins to configure their storage and retention policies as needed by their business. 

  • Additionally, should customers use both AWS and Azure, they can store content on both. 

• Support for Alfresco Search Enterprise 3.1 with Elasticsearch: Enables organizations to easily deploy, use and scale Elasticsearch with Alfresco. Alfresco has been undertaking performance testing on Alfresco Search Enterprise and made a number of improvements to increase scalability and performance benefiting those customers using Elasticsearch. 

• Replacement of log4j v1.2: We have replaced log4j v1 with reload4j 1.2.18.3 in the ACS 7.2 release. By removing log4j v 1.2.x with the latest reload4j version, Alfresco has removed security concerns of a very small number of our customers even though we have documented no known vulnerabilities in our product implementation. Customers who were unable to receive approvals from their Audit team based on information in our Hyland Community posts regarding log4j v1.2 on supported releases prior to ACS 7.2 can adopt ACS 7.2 which uses reload4j instead of log4j v1.2. 

Support for Alfresco Content Services 7.2 

Support for this release is via our customer support organisation who can be reached via phone, email and Hyland Community forums to help with your questions. 

Installation 

Alfresco Content Services 7.2 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 Compose images that can be used to build your own containers in docker-compose or Helm charts (for Kubernetes). 

See the Install documentation for more details on how to deploy using either approach. 

Azure and Glacier Connector Customers

ACS 7.2.0 will be released with optional new connectors: 

• S3 Connector 5.0.0 

• Azure Connector 3.0.0 

Note: For customers who had previously used the “Archive” action in a folder rule to move content into Glacier this is no longer supported. Customers wishing to continue using this functionality should not upgrade to 7.2. The S3 REST api provides support for moving content to Glacier or content can be manually moved to Glacier via the AWS S3 tools. 

Upgrading from previous releases

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous of Alfresco Content Services 7. There are 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 Upgrade 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 prior to starting 

• Review all new and deprecated features included in this release note 

• Review and implement the new supported stack options and the minimum versions of modules/extensions required, and update as necessary for the new deployment 

• Apply the recommended database optimisation patch for larger implementations (see upgrade documentation for details) 

Developer Guide 

See the Developer Guide for extensive guidance and reference materials. 

Deprecations 

• Alfresco Content Services Mobile App 

• Alfresco Content Connector for AWS S3 Glacier 

Library Upgrades 

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

• Spring has been upgraded to 5.3.15 (from 5.3.2 in ACS 7.0) 

• Camel has been upgraded to 3.15.0 (from 3.7.0 in ACS 7.0) 

• Jakarta has been upgraded to 2.3.3 

If you’re upgrading from ACS 6.x to ACS 7.x, check out the Migration Guide to find out if your integrations need refactoring actions. 

Supported Platforms 

See the Supported Platforms for full details of the platforms supported by this release. 

Upgraded integration artifacts 

Open