What do you guys think about new Confluence 7 server upgrade?

Question

I see Atlassian release beta for Confluence 7.

Here is the release notes https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-7-0-beta-release-notes-968660949.html

I believe these will be actually features they would ship in the end product. Honestly, I can't think of any feature to let end user know after this major upgrade. Atlassian is playing a hard ball here compared to cloud. If someone from Atlassian sees this, they would just comment saying they are different offerings or products.

Sometime this feature difference really annoys me!!!

When our customer talks about a new feature like next-gen features or roadmap in JIRA he found somewhere online.

All I have to say him is sorry, we have JIRA but it's not the same JIRA you are talking about.

Davin Studer · Answer

As a server customer (not data center) I am somewhat frustrated by the decisions that pretty much anything administrator focused only goes to data center. For instance the new permissions stuff will only go to data center ... as if server customers don't have issues with permissions as well. Also ,SAML support is only in data center. Lately, I've been pretty underwhelmed with Confluence releases. Yes, it's good to keep up on Tomcat, Java, and third party library updates, but I would like to see useful features added ... especially for those on server.

JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_ · Answer

Hi,

I think we can expect more UI relevant update in the upcoming releases. This is mainly a platform update needed for setting up new possibilities for search & other features.

Cloud & server / datacenter are different products. Maybe Atlassian should put more focus on explaining the differences & not how easy (?) it is to move from server to cloud.

If you're using server/datacenter, you've to handle much more dependencies compared to cloud. You cannot just change the UI or relevant features without preparing explanations, instructions or even do training. Most server customers use addons / apps. Sometimes Confluence is not even known with the product name in a company.

I always try to keep my Confluence server site quite up to date (Security issues are mostly fixed on the current version first, sometimes bugs are fixed I was waiting for a long time....). The introduction of the new search UI with Confluence 6.? was a big change for our users. Therefore I bundled some new features of various addons with it & called it a new release of our intranet with explanation, blog posts & some online training pages.

Major releases are for Confluence admins, but not necessarily for the users.

Best regards

JP