It's always good to have options: After Alfresco released the latest version 7.2 of its OpenSource ECM in the Community Edition, the latest version of the Alfresco Virtual Appliance from ecm4u is available almost at the same time, which, in addition to support from ecm4u for the Alfresco Community Edition, also has some other advantages.
Why Virtual Appliance?
ecm4u maintains its own optimized Alfresco VM in the Open Virtualization format, which enables organizations to get Alfresco up and running productively in minutes without much prior knowledge. The easy-to-install virtual machine incorporates many years of experience and best practices from operations at many large and small organizations.
Alfresco assumes that its ECM system is installed and operated via Docker and provides corresponding images and instructions. ecm4u offers an alternative for those who prefer a VM that is at least easier to use in operation and also easier to provide with security updates. In addition to an optimized Alfresco installation in a well-known Linux distribution with lower resource requirements (e.g. 6 vs. 16 GB RAM minimum requirement), the virtual appliance offers all sorts of additional optimizations and best practices compared to a standard Alfresco installation:
- Prepared backup and recovery mechanisms
- Multiple instantiation of the VM with modified setup for easy deployment of components
- Configuration, administration and monitoring through numerous scripts
- Operation as test system with productive data from snapshot backup (TimeMachine)
- Preparation for Active Directory integration and SSO via Kerberos
- Software components and updates from the Ubuntu LTS repository
- Pre-installed Alfresco modules
- Bug fixes and work-arounds for known issues
- Remote support through ecm4u
- Extensive HowTo wiki in ecm4u support system by administrators for administrators
What's new in Alfresco 7.2
Alfresco 7.2 is primarily a maintenance release with bug fixes.
- Solr: Jetty fails to start on openjdk versions having 4 digit version numbering
- Alternative mechanism to secure communication between Repository and Solr (SECRET or mTLS)
see also Alfresco 7.2.0 Release Notes
What's new in ecm4u Alfresco Virtual Appliance 7.2
- Alfresco 7.2 CE
- filerServerNG with SMB2/SMB3 and package signing support
- Ububtu 20.04 LTS (maintenance updates until mid 2024, see The Ubuntu lifecycle and release cadence)
- Adoptium OpenJDK with automatic updates via apt Package Manager
- Integration of Apache ActiveMQ and the Alfresco Transform Engine as a robust systemd service
- Update script for Alfresco Search Services
- Script to easily create and update the necessary certificates and configurations in the new formats
Curious? Check out Alfresco Virtual Appliance
We look forward to your feedback and your contact!
Picture credits: Johnnys_pic (Andrew Martin) lizensiert unter der pixabay license (free for commercial use)