Simply Content Management

QUESTION:
In Alfresco, How best to manage and record the process of migrating changes from Dev to prod?

ANSWER:

I thought I would share this knowledge with everyone, so that it will be useful for everyone…

1) Record the (configuration/customization) changes and files changed in DEV and document it separately. When we are ready to do the same in PROD, we will have to do the changes one-by-one.

The changes are going to be in as follows -

2) “<ALF_HOME>\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\lib” for any custom action implementation.

3) <ALF_HOME>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
4) <ALF_HOME>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\messages
5) <ALF_HOME>\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\web-extension
6) If there are more changes inside the non-custom area, then we will have to remember it as per our documentation we have done while making those changes in DEV. For example, we did changes to C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\share\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\site-data\presets\presets.xml directly, because there is no customization built on it yet in Alfresco.
7) We need to make sure we do the necessary changes in SHARE or ALFRESCO folders, if needed.
It is recommended the changes are done feature by feature. But in worst cases, it is OK to just move bulk changes of all the feature enhancements or configurations at once.
9) Restart the Alfresco server.
10) Alfresco server has to start and run perfectly without any errors.
11) Test every feature one by one.
12) Since it requires a restart of the Alfresco server, it is ideal to perform this operation only in off-times of the server with advanced notice.

Overall, it is *****RECOMMENDED***** that we move every feature’s changes one-by-one from DEV to PROD, after carefully testing in DEV for functional and also regression testing.

Hope this helps! Also please add, if I have missed anything and add any best practices in this note.

Thank you

Lately, I am into Alfresco and it has become very addictive, which is good in many ways.

I am starting to learn a lot, but definitely not enough any day. There is lot to learn but the point I am trying to make is – I am spending lot of time on my commute via iPhone on Alfresco forums and trying to read others posts and trying to answer if I have some clue or answer. This has been a great learning experience so far and I wish this continues on.

Alfresco forums is active to a great extent and we do get answers for the problems posted fairly quickly. Forums is a better channel to get answers for Alfresco, even when compared to Support. Since Alfresco (a great open source alternative for Enterprise Content Management in the market today) has a powerful community and partnership, hence it is faster to get answers in this route rather than that of the Support itself.

Have fun Alfresco-ing!

I tried to download Alfresco 3.1 for trying out something for my customer. I went to the following URL – www.alfresco.com/products/ecm/enttrial/ and I entered my details to download and I downloaded also.

When I look at what was downloaded it was Alfresco 3.2, instead of what I asked for. I am guessing Alfresco 3.2 is a much stable version than Alfresco 3.1. But I really want to install Alfresco 3.1 and upgrade it to Alfresco 3.2, because that is the requirement.

So, now I cannot try the above anyway, since I don;t have Alfresco 3.1. Is this usually done in other software also? Since the user is requesting for a trial version, the product vendor can give a stabler version than what the user asked for?

Let me know if there is some other reason!