• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

TSG Reviews – Alfresco 5.1.1 Released!

You are here: Home / Alfresco / TSG Reviews – Alfresco 5.1.1 Released!

August 4, 2016

TSG has been eagerly awaiting the release of Alfresco One Enterprise 5.1.1, which landed on July 20th.  We’ve had a few weeks to play around with the latest release and this post will summarize our thoughts.

Why so much excitement about a patch release?

Longtime TSG blog readers may be wondering why we didn’t blog about the 5.1 release sooner, since it was released way back in March 2016.  The reason is this bug: MNT-14543.  Essentially, if your model utilizes d:content properties, any updates to documents of this type (ex: a property change) caused the document to drop out of the Solr index, making the document impossible to search for.  Since TSG uses a d:content property in our models to handle document renditions, this issue made Alfresco 5.1 a non-starter for us.  See this post on working with versions in Alfresco for more information on why we use a content property, and especially the “Technical Explanation” section for our technically inclined readers.

We’re happy to see that the issue was fixed in the 5.1.1 release.   According to Alfresco, this fix was applied to the 5.0.4 release as well.  If you’re an Alfresco customer on versions 5.0 or above, definitely look into upgrading, especially if any of your content models utilize a custom d:content property.

Notable Improvements in Alfresco 5.1

For full details, see Alfresco’s documentation for all of the new features in Alfresco 5.1.  The items that TSG is most exited about are:

Smart Folders

Smart Folders are a new feature in Alfresco Share that allow you to display information in folders based on metadata, not physical location.  See Alfresco’s release documentation on Smart Folders for additional details.  TSG has been pushing our clients to break the “file system folders” habit in ECM for a long time.  We feel that it is much faster for users to access content via search and/or “smart folders”.  Smart folders are especially important in case management solutions (ex: insurance policy and claim).  It’s good to see that Alfresco Share is now adding Smart Folder capabilities for these types of systems.

Model Manager

Before the 5.1 release, all alfresco models were defined in XML files.  While functional, there are two main drawbacks to the XML approach:

  • Updates Require Restart – being XML files in the bowels of the Alfresco file structure, any changes to these files require a restart of the entire Alfresco system.
  • User Friendliness – beyond needing to write XML, which isn’t terribly difficult, administrators have to know all of the possible options from experience or documentation.  With the XML, there’s no user interface guiding them through all the possible options when building a content model.

In the 5.1 release however, a new Model Manager is available in Alfresco share that lets administrators build content models in a user friendly GUI.  This includes everything you would expect – types, aspects, properties, and constraints.  Read more about the model manager here.

While this is a step in the right direction, one thing that was disappointing is that if you have existing models that are structured using the XML approach, they are not accessible in the model manager.  TSG is hopeful that this capability is added in a future release.

Solr Sharding

In previous releases, Solr could only have one index.  While this is fine for small and medium deployments, for very large deployments this is a problem since the Solr index would grow too large and performance is impacted.  Solr sharding allows the index to be split up into multiple parts, and indexes even can be located on separate machines.  This update is a very welcome addition, especially for customers that need to store a large amount of data in Alfresco.  Read more about Solr sharding here.

Final Thoughts

Overall, TSG feels like the 5.1 release added a lot of new features, most on the back-end side.  There were a few additional updates to Share not mentioned above as well which will certainly be welcome for clients that rely on it as their primary Alfresco user interface.  With the 5.1.1 release, we’re happy to see that the Solr indexing issue was fixed and we can now start utilizing it on our client deployments.

Filed Under: Alfresco, News, Share

Reader Interactions

You must log in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Documentum Discontinues Developer Edition – Documentum to Alfresco Migration – Development Environment and Philosophy
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Documentum or Alfresco Interface – Ready for an Upgrade?
  • Alfresco Deployment – No Code vs Low Code
  • Alfresco Share – Folder Comparison with OpenContent Management Suite
  • Alfresco Share – Contributor Comparison with OpenContent Management Suite
  • Alfresco Share – Search Comparison with OpenContent Management Suite
  • Alfresco Share – Comparison with OpenContent Management Suite Series
  • Alfresco Solutions of the Year 2017 – TSG wins Alfresco award for sixth year in a row
  • Alfresco Acquired by Thomas H Lee – Initial Thoughts

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2023 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT