Upgrading from 6.4 to 7.x JIRA. Any major changes I should make my teams aware of?

[Nate Hickman]

As part of my company separating from our parent company, we are migrating out of their JIRA (currently 6.4) to our own instance and are upgrading in the process to 7.x. We'll be coordinating QA activities soon and I haven't seen the new site on 7.x yet, so I don't know if there are any visual or style changes. In anticipation of users being confused because something looks different, I was wondering if anyone is aware of any major changes to the layout or functionality between these versions? 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There's quite a lot "under the hood" structural stuff, but generally, you'll find your users jumping from 6 to 7 won't be too shocked.  Stuff doesn't move around too much, issues are still issues, projects are projects and so-on.  I think the only two I've been questioned on is "where did the issue actions menu go?" (over to the right of the screen) and "where is the excel download?" (deprecated and turned off, but you can re-enable it.  For now)

Your admins are going to have a lot to do though.

I would strongly recommend setting up a test system and letting your users have a play though.

[Nate Hickman]

Thank you very much for the quick answer! As far as testing goes we have setup a new environment for our JIRA and Confluence spaces, we're then extracting everything of ours from our parent company and migrating it to this new environment which is essentially the same but on the latest versions. We're planning a week of QA and if everything appears to have made it over correctly we'll wipe it, do the migration one more time and call it good. 

When you say our admins are going to have a lot to do though, do you mean as far as doing the upgrade or just living in the new upgraded version? We're working with a 3rd party Atlassian consultant who is handling the migration and upgrade for us. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Getting a partner in makes it a lot easier

Your admins should be ok with an upgraded system, they'll need to read up on the changes from "JIRA + add-ons" to "JIRA is an application platform" so they can handle the users, but there's not a lot that they won't be able to pick up straight away if they're familiar with 6.4