Understanding the Alfresco upgrade process

Upgrading Alfresco is a multi-step process. Based on how customizations are done and what new features available, you will need to first decide the target version of Alfresco. Based on the currently installed version, there could be different paths to upgrade it.

Upgrading involves moving all the content (database, content store, indexes) to a new version of Alfresco, and any feature customization done in Alfresco needs to be upgraded to make it compatible with the new system. The last step is to validate the whole system and data.

Now let's go through each of the steps in detail.

Choosing the upgrade path

Alfresco's major versions are 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x. 2.x is the oldest version and 5.0 is the latest version available in Alfresco. Recently, Alfresco has stopped support for any version older than 4.x.

The standard upgrade process is if your current Alfresco system version is 2.x, then you cannot directly upgrade to 4.x or 5.0 as there...