Alfresco Content Services 7.3 Release Notes｜November 14th, 2022

Alfresco Content Services 7.3 Release Notes

November 14th, 2022 

The following notes provide detailed information on the 7.3 Minor Release for Alfresco Content Services. 

Alfresco Content Services 7.3 is a minor 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 7.3, 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 7.3 delivers functionality to enable customers and developers to install Alfresco created solutions and to customize the product through integrations, APIs and SDKs. 

Customers can purchase an upgrade from Alfresco Community Edition to Alfresco Content Services 7.3 to enable advanced features and purchase Alfresco applications, connectivity and solutions. 

This release contains enhancements completed for the release of Alfresco Content Services 7.3. 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 the release. Alfresco Content Services 7.3 shares much of its code with Alfresco Community Edition and adds significant functionality in the release. 

What’s new

Java 17 support 

Alfresco Content Services 7.3 now supports running on Java 17. See the Supported Platforms page for all supported technologies. 

Support for Alfresco Search Enterprise 3.2 with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch 

Enables organizations to easily deploy, use and scale Elasticsearch or OpenSearch with Alfresco. 7.3 builds on 7.2 and further extends support to Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. 

New License 

Since September 1st 2017, the Alfresco EULA forbids adding workflows to the workflow engine embedded in Alfresco Content Services. With the release of version 7.3, this will be enforced through a check on a flag in the license file. 

Customers who bought Alfresco Content Services before September 1st 2017 will retain the ability to add and modify workflows for the embedded workflow engine. Customers who bought Alfresco Content Services on or after September 1st 2017 will not be able to add workflows. They will only be able to change workflows with the following IDs: "activitiReview", "activitiInvitationNominated", "activitiReviewPooled", "activitiParallelReview", "activitiAdhoc", "activitiParallelGroupReview", "activitiInvitationModerated", "activitiInvitationNominatedAddDirect", "resetPassword" or "companyRFC". 

Activiti Console removed 

As part of the gradual decommissioning of the embedded workflow engine, the embedded Activiti Workflow Console has been removed from Alfresco Content Services. 

Deprecations

We are ending support for the Share based module for SAML and replacing it with an IDS based solution, that will greatly improve the customer SSO experience. 

Improvements

Please visit https://alfresco.atlassian.net/ for full details on improvements made in this release. 

Library Upgrades 

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

• Spring has been upgraded to 5.3.23 (from 5.3.15 in ACS 7.2) 

• Camel has been upgraded to 3.18.2 (from 3.15.0 in ACS 7.2) 

• Jakarta remains at 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. 

Installation

Alfresco Content Services 7.3 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 

ACS 7.3.0 will be released with optional connectors: 

• S3 Connector 5.1.0 

• Azure Connector 3.1.0 

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 7.3. 

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) 

Known Issues

None 

Support

Support for this release is in line with our Product support policy: https://www.alfresco.com/services/subscription/technical-support/product-support-status  

If you require support, please visit the Alfresco Support Portal: https://support.alfresco.com 

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