Introducing Release notes on Atlassian Community (Beta) – a new home for Cloud release notes

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

We’re kicking off the public beta for Release notes on Atlassian Community – a new, real‑time public hub for Atlassian Cloud release notes that will eventually replace the Atlassian Cloud blog as the primary source of truth for what’s changing in Jira, Confluence, and other Atlassian Cloud apps. You can find it at community.atlassian.com/release-notes.

Today, many Atlassian users have a fragmented view of changes across monthly emails, in‑product messages, support articles, and third‑party changelogs. Release notes on Atlassian Community aims to eventually bring this into one place.

This early public beta is focused on making it easier for admins and teams to find, understand, and share what’s changing in Atlassian Cloud.

Release notes on Atlassian Community: what it is and why it matters

Release notes on Atlassian Community will:

• Provide a searchable, filterable hub for Atlassian Cloud release notes, so teams can quickly find what changed and what it means for them.

• Show general rollout timing and included changes to support planning, testing, and internal change‑management communications.

• Help organizations plan, test, and validate upcoming changes — and make it easy to share the most relevant release notes internally.

• Bring full release notes to all customers, where they were previously only viewable in Atlassian Administration.

• Give teams a single place to point users when they ask, “What changed?”

What’s next

Our initial focus is on bringing the Admin App updates experience to a wider group of customers. Next, we’re exploring:

• A dedicated tab to review changes released via Release tracks.

• A dedicated tab to review upcoming seasonal release changes.

• Scores and contextual tags to highlight the most impactful changes and add helpful context.

• …and more improvements based on your feedback.

We’d love your feedback

We’d love to hear from you — please share your thoughts and feedback in the comments so we can shape Release notes on Atlassian Community with your needs in mind. Thank you.

About Atlassian Community

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[Bill Sheboy]

Greetings, @Alex Chiu 

While I think this new notes area is an improvement over the blog, I have a question and an observation:

Even when the community pages are not working / updating, the Atlassian Cloud blog of release changes still works as it is a separate entity.  And, the Atlassian status page information which appears to contain the community pages is rarely updated for incidents, outages, etc.  And so...

Question: How will the community members know when the new Release Notes area is working / update-to-date, versus "stuck" and not current? 

Observation: There is no indication of "last updated" on the new area, and the granularity appears to be monthly rather than weekly as with the current release blog.  This change makes it harder for product admins to diagnose release-related, symptom timeframes and causes: defects, regressions, etc.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Darryl Lee]

THIS. IS. GREAT. @Alex Chiu 

So much better than the frankly embarrassing Atlassian Cloud Documentation blog posts 

• Permanent links to individual changes! (Instead of having to rely on "Copy link to highlight" browser hack.)
• Drastically expanded change descriptions including Key changes and Benefits

Very much looking forward to additional features, notably "A dedicated tab to review changes released via Release tracks" so maybe I wouldn't have to maintain https://releasetracks.atlassian.net/wiki anymore.

(One suggestion for Release tracks - categorize the changes: Navigation, Development, Admin, etc.)

But this is a solid start.

Congratulations on the launch!!

[Dave LIAO]

@Alex Chiu - This is a step in the right direction! Kudos to the team for taking these steps to make it easier for ALL Atlassian users to understand what's coming down the pike.

[Alex Chiu]

Hi @Bill Sheboy 

Thanks for your feedback and for taking the time to share your observations!

To clarify a couple of points about how the new Release Notes on Atlassian Community works — the release notes here actually function more like a live news feed rather than a periodic publication. They're consistently updated in real time as new changes ship, so the granularity is actually much better compared to the old blog, which updated on a weekly cadence. Each note reflects an individual change as it rolls out, rather than being batched into weekly summaries.

That said, your point is well taken — I understand that it's not immediately obvious which release notes are new or when the feed was last refreshed. We already have planned improvements in the works to help customers better understand which release notes are new and unread, so stay tuned for more updates.

Also, thank you for the recommendation around surfacing "last updated" indicators — we'll absolutely consider this for future improvements as we continue iterating on this experience.

[Alex Chiu]

Hi @Darryl Lee 

Thank you so much for the kind words, our team really appreciate it! 

And thank you for maintaining the Public Release tracks release notes page for so long. The Atlassian Community is great because of contributors like you who go above and beyond to help others stay informed.

I am happy to share that a dedicated tab for reviewing Release Tracks bundles is already in the works and coming soon — so hopefully that'll save you some time going forward. Additionally, we're also working on better categorization of changes (e.g., UI-related, Admin, etc,) to help customers better understand what a new change is at a glance, so stay tuned. 

Thanks again for the support and for being such a valuable part of the Atlassian community!

[Julia Foden]

Thank you @Alex Chiu this looks really good. I was able to search it for the release notes for Create work items faster with a modernized experience which I had a rant about yesterday on Dave Meyer's Seasonal Release post. I had seen nothing before about this change to the Create experience but was able to find it easily on your Release Notes page, and the Release Note told me how I can switch it off, which I have now done. The Release Note also says that Atlassian will be learning from feedback on this change so I'll be sending that off via a support ticket now :)

Thanks again to you and the team for your work on the Release Notes.

[Julia Foden]

@Alex Chiu a question. When the release note says that Atlassian will learn from feedback, what is the preferred method for that feedback to be sent? A possible future improvement might be to have a 'feedback inbox' directly on the release note page.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Great news! I'm already discovering new rollouts/features that I wasn't even aware of they were being worked on!

For improvements I can only stand by my "coleagues" here. It would be nice to see when an item was added and when the full list was last updated. Other than that, definetly a move in the right direction! 

No more (or less) digging through blogs and documentation pages!

[Josh]

@Alex Chiu it's exciting to see this new functionality come to life! We really appreciate the hard work that you and @Sam Gazitt are doing to improve Atlassian's change management communication and release processes.

The post hasn't even been alive for a full day, and you've already had 3 Community Champions celebrating the change. It's not often that I see this level of immediate positive engagement on a Community article. You're clearly working on much needed improvements.

[Alex Chiu]

Hi @Julia Foden 

Unfortunately for that specific change, I don't believe a separate Community post was made — otherwise, that would normally be the best way to provide feedback directly to the product team building that feature.

One of the future improvements we'll be making is bringing release notes closer to additional materials product teams put out, such as Community posts and Support articles, so customers like yourself can easily find a new change's Community post and add feedback there. Stay tuned for that improvement!

[Alex Chiu]

Hi @Dirk Ronsmans 

Thank you for sharing this — really happy to hear the this new feature is working well for you and helping you discover features you weren't even aware were in the works! That's exactly the kind of outcome we were hoping for!

Your feedback echoes what we've heard from others — it's not immediately clear what's new or when items were last added. This is something we're actively looking into, so stay tuned for improvements on that front!

[Alex Chiu]

Hi @Josh

Thank you so much for the kind words and encouragement — it truly means a lot to the team working on this.

We still have a lot of exciting improvements to change management in the pipeline, so stay tuned — and I want to again thank everyone here for being such supportive voices on Atlassian Community!

[Julia Foden]

Hi @Alex Chiu 

In relation to Create work items faster with a modernized experience, would it be possible for you to get the product team to do a community post about it now? This change is causing upset and confusion - see for example this Q&A question where two community champions gave answers in good faith but they were obviously unaware of the change currently being rolled out.

[Josh]

@Alex Chiu the parameterized URL based on the applied filter selections is AWESOME! For example:

/release-notes?products=ANALYTICS%2CCMDB&limit=40

We can now bookmark a view with the products we care about and not have to set that every time. It's a great quality of life improvement that I almost missed.

For the next wave of features, would it be possible to provide some features to assist with time-based views?

• Add a column indicating the date that the release note was added
• Time-range style filter based on the new "Date Added" column
  • e.g. "added in last 7 days", "added this month", "added last month"
• Add a "Sort By" selector
  • e.g. "Date Added - Descending", "App", "Status"

This combination would enable people to quickly catch up on updates they may have missed. For example, org admins likely check the release notes at least once a week, but they get to take time off every now and then. If they're gone for a week or more, it would currently be challenging for them to identify the delta from what they've already seen vs what has been added while they were away.

Minor beta observation:

It looks like "Jira Service Desk" and "Jira Service Management" are listed separately in the app menu; could they be combined into "Jira Service Management"?

[Mykenna Cepek]

I am SO hopeful this will allow me to spend less time reviewing Release Notes.

The current weekly blog firehose format was so unbelievably frustrating that I wrote a process to screen-scrape it, compare with the prior week, and only show me the differences for the product areas I was interested in. It drastically reduced the time needed to keep up, but I shouldn't have had to build a tool.

Things I really like about this new Atlassian Release Notes Hub:

• Filtering by product, status, and change type
• Indication of Rollback - I don't recall ever seeing that in the release notes blog format
• Text search

Must-have features currently missing:

• Filtering by read/unread.
• Filtering by release track
• Define your terminology. Clarity about what "Planned" vs "Coming Soon" actually means. What is an "Experiment"? 

Should-have features currently missing:

• Since statuses are updated (Soon, Rolling out, GA, Rolled back), I need to keep an eye on changed statuses for a subset of items of key impact to my org. Read/unread will probably be insufficient for this, so being able to opt-in as a Watcher for items seems like the right solution. Filter on items I'm watching.
• Status changes reset an item to unread, based on a user-specific setting.
• I see values like "Starting in December 2024" in the "Rollout schedule" column. That's not helpful. My org wants to be aware of the rollout to my org (even generally, such as our data residency zone).

Thank you for working to improve this vital area of vendor-to-administrator communication.