End-of-life for Solr6-based Search (Alfresco Search Services and Insight Engine) Service

In the February 2026 newsletter, Hyland announced an important roadmap update for Alfresco Content Services. Announcement is specifically very important for Alfresco Search Service/Insight Engine. The Solr6-based Alfresco Search Service is being retired.

Key points (In case Alfresco community version users missed) as per the newsletter:

• End-of-life for Solr6-based search (Alfresco Search Services and Insight Engine) will occur with ACS 26.1, expected around mid-March 2026.

• ACS 25.x will be the final version supporting Solr6 (supposedly).

Replacement: 

• Alfresco Search Enterprise - powered by Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

What’s important for Alfresco Content Services Community Edition?

The ACS 26 Community Edition will initially continue using Apache Solr6 based Search Service (2.x most probably), but a future Alfresco Content Services Community release is expected to transition to Elasticsearch/OpenSearch as well.

The new platform (Originally released back in 2021) said to have support for same core query languages used previously with Solr6. 

Check here for unsupported features:

https://docs.alfresco.com/search-enterprise/latest/using/unsupported/

Important Notes:

— If you plan to try out Search Enterprise, make sure to use Search Enterprise 3.3 or later versions (4.0 is latest version). The “re-indexing” application, which is a component used to build the initial Elasticsearch index (specially while upgrading existing setup) or catch up on missed messages, uses a direct JDBC connection to the Alfresco database, and only PostgreSQL is supported for this specific application across versions such as 3.0, 3.1, 3.2. 

— There was a known issue (verified up to ACS 7.4.x and Search Enterprise 3.x), and I am not certain whether it has been resolved in the latest version of Search Enterprise 4.x.

JIRA:  https://alfresco.atlassian.net/browse/MNT-23347 (Status Unknown or may be Closed)

This was an issue with UPDATE event when using search enterprise to control the indexing behavior. 

Scenario:

- If you use folder rule to apply the cm:indexControl aspect 

- Or If you use any script to update the node to apply the cm:indexControl aspect with cm:isContentIndexed to false

The Live Indexing app was missing to remove document from the index when an UPDATE includes the “cm:indexControl” aspect, at least the last time I tested it. 

While this may not be a major issue in many cases, it is still an important behavior that should be addressed.

____________________________________________

Update on known issue stated above:

The cm:indexControl UPDATE issue: 

Angel confirmed that this was a real bug in version 3.x and earlier. The good news is that it has been fixed in the current 4.x and 5.x codebase.

The fix resides in IndexingPropertyChecker.java and ElasticsearchRequestBuilder.java, which now correctly detect when cm:isIndexed or cm:isContentIndexed changes to false during an UPDATE event. When this occurs, the system properly removes the document (or its content) from the index.

Additionally, integration tests covering this scenario have been added to ensure the behavior works as expected.

Thank you Angel Borroy for checking.