What's new in Alfresco Content Services

You can follow our latest updates at Alfrescodocs.

• Alfresco Digital Workspace
• Identity Service
• ActiveMQ
• Transform Service
• Cloud deployment templates
• Java 11 support
• Upgraded integrations
• Library upgrades
• REST APIs
• Removed features
• Deprecations

Alfresco Digital Workspace

Alfresco Digital Workspace is a new browser based web application built with Alfresco Application Development Framework (ADF). The Digital Workspace provides an alternative, streamlined user interface for end users, making simple tasks such as uploading, downloading, searching for content, and collaborating easier than ever.

Alfresco Content Services automatically deploys the application when using Helm charts or a Docker Compose file. Administrators can also manually install Alfresco Content Services using standard WAR files, and then configure the installation to include the Digital Workspace.

The Digital Workspace provides comprehensive extensibility features for developers, using the ADF, and allows them to easily and quickly create custom solutions for specific use cases. See the developer documentation for details.

See Alfresco Digital Workspace documentation for more.

Identity Service

Single Sign-On (SSO) using the new Alfresco Identity Service 1.0 is supported by the Alfresco Content Services v1 REST APIs. Other components in Alfresco Content Services, such as Alfresco Share and protocol access, do not support the Identity Service at this time.

See Identity Service documentation for more.

ActiveMQ

Previously, this was optional so this is a change from earlier releases. ActiveMQ is now bundled with the repository (in containerized deployments only) to handle raw events.

See Alfresco ActiveMQ Docker images: GitHub Repo and DockerHub Repo

ActiveMQ is required when manually installing Alfresco Content Services 6.1 onwards.

Transform Service

The Transform Service performs transformations for Alfresco Content Services in scalable containers. It is enabled by default for Docker Compose and Helm deployments. It is included, but disabled by default, in the zip distribution.

See Alfresco Transform Service documentation for more.

Cloud deployment templates

Alfresco Content Services can now be deployed on AWS EKS using Helm charts. This project is in ongoing development and is not designed for production use, although it can be used as a template to get started in quickly orchestrating your Alfresco Content Services infrastructure.

This can be done using the Alfresco Content Services on AWS deployment project in GitHub.

See Deploying Alfresco Content Services using AWS CloudFormation documentation for more.

Java 11 support

Alfresco Content Services now supports OpenJDK 11.0.1 and OracleJDK 11.0.1, upgrading from OracleJDK 8.

Upgraded integrations

Alfresco Content Services 6.1 introduces changes that require new releases of some modules. To upgrade to Alfresco Content Services 6.1, you'll also need to update any of the module artifacts to which you're entitled.

See Supported Platforms for more.

With this release, the Alfresco Search Services documentation is published to a new location.

See Alfresco Search Services documentation for more.

Library upgrades

A number of underlying third-party libraries have been updated in both the repository and Share.

REST APIs

The repository REST APIs have been expanded to support a broader set of use cases.

See the online REST API Explorer for further information and full documentation for each endpoint.

Removed features

• NTLM v1 authentication has been removed and is no longer available.
• "Passthru" authentication subsystem has been removed and is no longer available.
• CIFS support was removed.

Deprecations

TransformService and RenditionService:

The TransformService and RenditionService Java APIs have been deprecated. The ability to perform synchronous transformations will be phased out as the new Transform Service takes effect. Renditions triggered using the existing repository REST API but will now be processed asynchronously using the new services.