Migration & upgrade of Alfresco Community

Quotes from:

Nicolas MENGOZZI - Technical Project Manager Engineer | Département du Var

Jean-Marie LE BORGNE - Operations Engineer CD83 | Département du Var

Nathalie FABRE - Finance Project Manager Engineer CD83 | Département du Var

Background

Upgrade of Alfresco to 7.2, with a data migration from 5.2 including custom code, and with minimal service downtime.

“The migration procedure was planned with JECI beforehand and had to follow a well-defined scenario to avoid any overrun. The migration schedule, the go-live scenario and the deadlines were all met.”

The department’s organisation

Within its IT department, the Conseil départemental du Var (Var Departmental Council) runs several thematic EDM systems, depending on the services. A finance EDM with a connector to the SEDIT application, and a social services EDM with a connector to the Genesis application. Both instances run on Alfresco Community.

Request

The finance EDM was running Alfresco 5.2 and needed to be upgraded for security reasons and to keep it working properly with the SEDIT application. The request was to upgrade the services while migrating the data and the index. The particular challenge was to keep this instance compatible with the existing in-house custom code.

Implementation / solution

We containerised the installation of the Finance EDM with Docker. The upgrade required a full re-indexing, due to the move from Solr 4 to Solr 6. Thanks to our industrialised installation process, the time between the go-live rehearsal and the actual go-live was kept to a minimum (3 days). The upgrade took 3 hours, a short service interruption given the 651 gigabytes of data.

“Among other things, the scenario included migrating our in-house custom code to the new version of Alfresco, as well as minimising service downtime. This commitment was met, and downtime was minimal given the data volume. A test environment identical to the production environment was also set up quickly. During this project, JECI demonstrated its command of the Alfresco environment and its specificities, in particular through its swift handling of the various issues reported during the acceptance testing phase.”

Outcomes

Our Docker-based deployment system allowed the system administrators to keep using systemd. Since Docker Compose is not suitable for production, each container is defined as a systemd service. This lets system administrators keep their usual way of working, and even simplifies their processes. To learn more: Docker RUN with Systemd

Moreover, no issues have been reported since, and maintenance is easier.

“We can still use the ‘classic’ system commands of a Linux server, which allows our system teams to build on existing know-how.

This upgrade made our EDM more reliable and improved our existing operating procedures, giving us greater confidence in keeping our Alfresco instance in operational condition. Since the go-live, no issues have been reported by the applications connected to the EDM.”

Learn more

• Our Alfresco migration and upgrade services
• Why upgrade to Alfresco 7?
• All our articles on application containerisation

About

Jeci is a services company that has specialised in Alfresco Community for more than 10 years. Jeci has recognised expertise in taking over existing code and in industrialised deployment. To improve the user experience, since 2021 Jeci has been publishing Pristy, an EDM software built on Alfresco Community, with a modern and intuitive interface.