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.

Control indexing in Alfresco with Alfresco Search Services

I came acorss a query from a friend to disable content indexing and allow only matadata indexing recently. The last time i tried this when i was using Alfresco 5.0 with Solr4. This time i tried with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.0.1 and Alfresco Search Services 2.0.3.5 and the good news is that, it still works. 

If your application does not require full-text content search capability, then disabling content indexing comes handy and increases the performance as well.

If you are curious to try out, then follow along.

Pre-requisites

• You have an environment up and running with Alfresco Content Services 7.x and Alfresco Search Services 2.x (Solr6)
• You have administrative privileges

Looking for Alfresco Content Services 7.x with Alfresco Search Services 2.x installation steps? , checkout these posts:

Setup ACS-7.x, ASS-2.x and Local Transformation Service using distribution package step by step Part-1

Setup ACS-7.x, ASS-2.x and Local Transformation Service using distribution package step by step Part-2

Content and metadata are indexed by default, it is out-of-the-box behavior. There are two ways you can control content/metadata indexing behavior in order to fulfil the search and indexing requirements. We will go over both options.

Control indexing behavior with help of content model aspect:

To control the indexing behavior, you can make use of a content model aspect named "cm:indexControl" which has two properties. These properties indicate whether content/metadata should be indexed.

The value of these properties are set to true by default.

<aspect name="cm:indexControl">
	<title>Index Control</title>
	<properties>
		<property name="cm:isIndexed">
			<title>Is indexed</title>
			<type>d:boolean</type>
			<default>true</default>
		</property>
		<property name="cm:isContentIndexed">
			<title>Is content indexed</title>
			<type>d:boolean</type>
			<default>true</default>
		</property>
	</properties>
</aspect>

You can apply cm:indexControl aspect on the nodes to control the indexing behavior by setting the appropriate properties. Note that, this approach works only for certain types like cm:folder, cm:content and sub-types. You need to keep in mind that, if you have a large number of nodes which needs to be excluded from content/metadata indexing then this option is not a right choice as you will have to apply the aspect by setting "cm:isContentIndexed" to "false" on all those nodes. 

In this situation second option (which we will see next) comes handy.

To learn more on content model, aspects and their application, refer:  Content Model Extension Point

If you wish to bulk apply the aspect with updated values, this post may be useful as a reference: Applying the aspects in bulk