Onboarding

What should we do to onboard to censhare and Keycloak?

censhare 2022 with Keycloak bring about some important changes regarding installation, configuration and development.

It is therefore mandatory that you make yourself familiar with the product and developer documentation and tutorials before you start to upgrade or install to censhare releases as of 2022.1:

Read the following chapters:

You also need knowledge about Keycloak as some configurations and customization are moved to Keycloak and can only be carried out in Keycloak.

Frontend customization censhare Web

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  • Customization updates: If the project has its own customization in form of additional frontend code (placed in the censhare-Custom folder), and for any locale that is used, you need to properly build and deploy the extensions. See Release frontend bundles and Build, release, deploy frontend bundles. This can be prepared in a local Dev environment. See Getting started censhare. 
  • Customization workflow: Developing censhare custom solutions now involves additional steps. You have to set up a DevOps environment that allows you to track, merge, test, stage and deploy the desired scope of changes. Customizations involved building, releasing, and deploying weppacked frontend bundles. See DevOps environment and Build, release, deploy frontend bundles.
  • Branding: The dynamic branding with a  Branding asset that is assigned in the  System asset no longer work. The  Branding asset is deprecated. If you upgrade your branded censhare from an earlier version below 2021.2, you must implement the new branding. Your old branding will not work anymore. See Custom branding.

Deployment

As a censhare partner, can we deploy censhare 2022 ourselves?

Please note, that you need direct access to your environments (for example, data center) to be able to deploy censhare on your own.

Are our data centers ready to roll out censhare 2022 and Keycloak?

censhare WP includes additional software components as compared to the censhare Classic, e.g. a load balancer and a database for Keycloak. It may require an upgrade in your hardware. Please consult your censhare partner or partner account manager.

Is censhare IT able to update/upgrade our systems to censhare 2022 and what needs to be considered for existing customers?

Yes. censhare IT is well prepared to take care of updating or upgrading your systems to censhare 2022. When updating to new censhare versions, censhare IT will install censhare and Keycloak as well.

As a partner, which development environment can I use?

We do not officially provide a development environment for partners that is supported by censhare. In some special cases, a Docker environment is requested which we can only provide as-is. You can use it at your own risk but we do not provide any documentation or support.

Which censhare release can we use as a fallback, if something goes wrong with the censhare 2022 installation?

Every software update means changes in the database schemas. Those changes are a bit tricky to revert. This can only be done by applying SQL statements that revert the previous database migration also done by means of SQL statements and/or migration scripts. 

However, in a normal case, you should have a dry run of the system before you start generating any new data. Once you notice that you need a downgrade, you can deinstall the new version and install the previous one as well as use the latest database backup. Indeed, this mean that you need to prepare such backup in advance. 

Infrastructure

Will there be changes to the infrastructure costs?

As already mentioned, censhare WP includes additional software components as compared to censhare Classic. It may require an upgrade in the hardware you are using. Consequently, there can be a certain increase in your infrastructure costs. 

Please consult your censhare partner or partner account manager. If you are hosting your censhare system in a third-party cloud, you may need to involve your provider in the new cost calculation. 

Operation

Will there be changes to SLA and support due to Keycloak?

For understandable reasons, we cannot provide 2nd or 3rd level support for Keycloak. Our support services are limited to the integration of Keycloak with censhare. As Keycloak is a third-party tool, we cannot influence or change how Keycloak behaves. 

How is Keycloak licensed?

Keycloak is an open-source software product to allow single sign-on with Identity and Access Management aimed at modern applications and services. The open-source project is under the stewardship of Red Hat.

Keycloak is published under the free Apache 2.0 license.

Keycloak is based on standard protocols and provides support for OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML.