Forums

Articles
Create
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Where are the Release Notes for Release Tracks?

Atlassian touts release tracks as a way to “Plan, prepare, and ensure the success of product changes”.

By putting your Production instance on the Bundled track and your Sandbox on the Preview track, you should be able to review upcoming changes a month before they impact your users.

Which is indeed great. And Atlassian even provides release notes of these upcoming changes. But…

giphy

  1. The release notes that Atlassian sends to org admins via email are not availably anywhere publicly or permanently.
  2. The release notes lack screenshots and links to more details about the new features. Ideally there would be links to official Atlassian documentation, Community Forums announcements, JAC tickets etc.
  3. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the ordering of release notes. Changes only applicable to admins are mixed in with user-facing changes. Changes are not grouped by category.

So, https://releasetracks.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/RT/ (Unofficial Atlassian Release Tracks Notesis an attempt to remedy that situation, by taking Atlassian’s emailed Release Notes, putting them in a “permanent” location, hopefully better organized, and trying to add useful screenshots, links, etc.

12 comments

Darryl Lee
Community Champion
December 16, 2025

For the upcoming Jan 13, 2026 Jira Release I've not spent a lot of time reviewing the notes, but MAN, they sure did hit their December OKRs with this list of features:

Like # people like this
Darryl Lee
Community Champion
December 16, 2025

Some commentary - why doesn't Atlassian post these release notes on a public site? Why are they organized so poorly?

Clearly Atlassian knows how to create good release notes. They’ve been doing it for their on-prem products for decades:

Anyways, the purpose of this Confluence site is to have a place where interested parties (starting with some admins who are tired of having to do this alone for their own users) can “enhance” the barebones emails that Atlassian sends every month.

I'm thinking screenshots, links to documentation, and commentary? Sure why not.

If you're interested in contributing, let me know!

Like # people like this
Calvin
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Champions.
December 16, 2025

Oh wow, I didn't know this existed, the notes going to the Org makes it really difficult for us as site admins because we literally can't do any change management for our teams. What sort of happens now is that I know something is coming sometime in the next say 5 months, then randomly it appears and I have to calm all my users down and pretend I knew all along.

Unfortunately our org admins are quite busy as we have a number of sites and they don't really have capacity (and I'm unsure if they have appetite) to be ale to regularly share every change each time.

Maybe this might be an unofficial way I can get this info. Cheers

Darryl Lee
Community Champion
December 16, 2025

One last comment -

I'm also going back through old release notes and copy/pasting those straight from the emails. So no extra formatting/commentary, but at least there will be an archive:

We migrated to Cloud at the beginning of 2024, so I only have release notes going back to the May 13, 2024 release.

If you have any Preview or Bundled release notes older than that, I'd love to build out the archive.

Like Steve Rhodes likes this
Sami Shaik
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Champions.
December 17, 2025

@Darryl Lee 

 

Thanks for sharing the space, and indeed it's very useful. Can we also add comments on the features listed in the space?

Josh
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Champions.
December 17, 2025

@Darryl Lee I couldn't agree more! I'd love to see Atlassian dedicate a bunch of resources to cleaning up their customer change management approach. Right now, it feels like we're getting shotgun blasts of updates all over the place (and not just contained within the release notes pages / communications).

Ideally, there could be a central release notes page with greater filtering / view capabilities (e.g. differentiate between release tracks and continuous releases), include dates when the features were announced and allow us to filter out stuff that has been on the list for weeks or months, etc.

 

Meme: "Opportunities Opportunities everywhere" - All Templates - Meme -arsenal.com

Like Anne Saunders likes this
Darryl Lee
Community Champion
December 17, 2025

Hi @Sami Shaik - ok, I've set up a form to request access to the space:

(Oh god, I have a request tracker.)

Like Sami Ahmed Shaik likes this
Darryl Lee
Community Champion
December 17, 2025

@Josh So. Many. Opportunities.

But will Atlassian see the value? Meh. I mean, Community Forums is now their official/unofficial location for announcing/documenting features, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But speaking of Continuous Releases:

I would be remiss if I did not mention that @Jens Schumacher - Released.so created an unofficial changelog for Atlassian Cloud that tracks the Continuous track at https://atlassian.released.so/ that he calls:

The Better Atlassian Cloud Changelog

And indeed, if you are on the Continuous Track (Free, Standard, or for some reason like to torment yourself and your Premium/Enterprise users), then this is like 1000x better than trying to track changes via Atlassian Cloud Documentation blog posts which don’t even have permalinks. Check it out!

(And yes, Jens and I have talked about trying to integrate Bundled/Preview Release Tracks into his changelog, but it would involve downloading JSON files from the admin.atlassian.com interface via unofficial APIs using session cookies, which is a pretty nasty hack.)

Like # people like this
Josh
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Champions.
December 17, 2025

@Darryl Lee I'm doing my best to articulate the value to every Atlassian PM I speak with (which is quite a few these days). :-)

 

I do appreciate the Released changelog that @Jens Schumacher - Released.so put together. It is my starting point every week and has definitely helped filter out a lot of noise, but I still need to check a bunch of additional sources to make sure nothing's missed.

HAEGELIN Sacha
Contributor
December 18, 2025

Hello @Darryl Lee ,

On my side my concern is the reliability of the information provided.
I received this mooning 20 updates to feature release notes I'm watching where they modified the rollout date.
meany feature also are not properly tagged as Jira when the summary says it is related to confluence for example.


This rollout date should be related to the sites in our organization. Sorry guy I have nothing to care when features are pushed to other organizations 

Having information from Atlassian is one thing but we would also need information from the marketplace application which are pushing updates on release track sites like if they were configured on continuous track

It would be also really great if Atlassian could learn how to use Jira and give reference to the feature request and bugs they deliver in each release.
Issue Navigator - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

Darryl Lee
Community Champion
December 18, 2025

Hi @HAEGELIN Sacha! You bring up excellent points!

So here's the thing.

My organization gets the same features as everybody else who is on the Release and Preview Tracks.

Here's how I know. On admin.atlassian.com when I go to Release tracks as I've documented here and look at these screens: 

image.pngimage.png

I took a peek under the covers using Chrome DevTools and discovered endpoints that contain each release's list of feature IDs. Those endpoints ALSO include the cloudIDs for every instance that has received or is going to receive each release.

Next time you're logged into your Admin console, pop another tab and go here:

https://admin.atlassian.com/gateway/api/admin/private/release_track/v1/release-history/org_id/YOURORG/product/Confluence?cloud-id=YOURCLOUDID&count=4

But yeah, in the end, this IS Unofficial, as the title of the space says. 

YES, It would be great if Atlassian did this themselves, with proper links to features and bugs, as you say. 

And yes, I've also had mixed results with Release Notes I've subscribed to, and yes, having to keep up with App Updates as well is a nightmare.

But I'm just trying to help in some small way. Thanks for your comments!

Like Josh likes this
Suzie Ahlers
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
December 19, 2025

@Darryl Lee are you able to access the cloud changes site (publicly)? I tested it and I believe this is public-facing but I always like to ask a customer since I'm on an Atlassian laptop.

Comment

Log in or Sign up to comment
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events