Alfresco Product Naming and Numbering

As we transition to the new Hyland Community, some post links may be temporarily disrupted as we finalize redirects. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. Details.

pauldhampton

Background

Apparently there has been some confusion over the various product names and the version numbering that has been used by Alfresco in the past (see a sample below).



[caption id='attachment_62' align='aligncenter' width='500' caption='Alfresco Product Names'][/caption]



Now what makes perfect sense to us at Alfresco does not always mean the same thing to the Alfresco Community. For example while we knew that ‘Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2r’ meant that it would support ‘Records Management’ this was not immediately obvious to others. And when we released Alfresco Community Edition 3.3g (the g meant that it included a technology preview of the Google Docs integration), people asked what happened to versions a, b, c, d, e and f!



So to make it simpler we are adopting the following numbering convention...

Alfresco Community

The Alfresco Community product is freely available to download and use. Future versions of Alfresco Community will be identified by the following numbering scheme:

Alfresco Community Major.Minor.Build

Where:

• Major - Number used to identify major releases in functionality (examples 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 etc.)
• Minor - Number used to identify minor releases (example 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 etc.). There will be multiple minor releases for each major release
• Build - Builds that are publicly released will be identified by a letter (example 3.4.a, 3.4.b, 3.4.c etc.)

The addition of a build letter will enable Alfresco to release multiple incremental builds for each minor version. These could be to provide a more stable version, or to include a technology pre-view. Each of these will be incremental (starting with a) so should allow people to easily understand which is the latest version.

Alfresco Enterprise

The Alfresco Enterprise product is provided to subscription customers. It has some enterprise extensions and goes through a more extensive QA process. Future versions of Alfresco Enterprise will be identified by the following numbering scheme:

Alfresco Enterprise Major.Minor.ServicePack.HotFix

Where:

• Major - Number used to identify major releases in functionality (examples 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 etc.)
• Minor - Number used to identify minor releases (example 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 etc.). There will be multiple minor releases for each major release
• ServicePack - Number to identify the service pack included (examples 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3, etc.)
• HotFix - Number to identify which hot fix is included (examples 3.3.1.115)

As Alfresco Enterprise goes through its development cycle, various pre-view (alpha, beta) releases will be made available to customers. These will be identified with the full pre-view name (Example 3.3.alpha or 3.3.beta). This should stop any confusion about 3.3.a being an alpha version.

Cheetah

The next release has been code named ‘Cheetah’ and will be released as 3.4. So expect to see Alfresco Community 3.4.a and Alfresco Enterprise 3.4.0 released over the next few months.



You can check the roadmap to see what will be delivered as part of Cheetah and Swift.

names.png

blog_commenter

Awesome description. Very helpful.