nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Where are the Release Notes for Release Tracks?

Darryl Lee

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

The release notes that Atlassian sends to org admins via email are not availably anywhere publicly or permanently.
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.
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 Notes) is 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.

Comments

Darryl Lee

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:

Darryl Lee

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!

Calvin

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

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:

Original Release Notes (Copy/Pasted from Emails)

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.

Sami Shaik

@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

@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

Darryl Lee

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

Request access

(Oh god, I have a request tracker.)

Darryl Lee

@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.)

Josh

@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

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

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:

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!

Suzie Ahlers

@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.

Darryl Lee

Oof, sorry I missed your question @Suzie Ahlers - yes the cloud changes site is publicly accessible (hint: Incognito Mode is your friend).

The problem with that site is that it ONLY covers the Continuous Release Track.

Most Atlassian Admins would prefer to NOT live on the bleeding edge, because they don't really like starting every day with a deluge of questions/complaints from their users about why something is different in Jira or Confluence.

Hence, Bundled and Preview Release Tracks.

But yeah, there's no public archive/record of what is actually IN these Release Tracks.

Hence Unofficial Atlassian Release Tracks Notes

Troy Anderson_htyevj

The Cloud Changes confluence space is down right when I finally have time to check it out!

Darryl Lee

@Troy Anderson Oof. Maybe they're migrating to Cloud? :-D

I would heartily recommend The Better Atlassian Cloud Changelog as an alternative (that pulls from that Blog as its source. When it's up.)

Michiel SCHUIJER

What about the new site Launch notes - What’s new in Jira?

Did anyone check that out yet, and do you think it's any good for you?

I have used it to inform our users, as that was my most pressing issue, so users of the platform can inform themselves finally, about recent changes and upcoming ones, instead of us having to inform people of each and every change. We'll still do that as well, periodically and in some way or form, but hopefully less is needed there with this site that I only stumbled on by accident.

It does not cover all releases by far, but I'm less worried about the admin-related changes as I don't need to communicate those. Still, finding the time to go through the release track and notes is tough.

Rick Westbrock

@Michiel SCHUIJER I just looked at that site for the first time and the concept is sound and I really appreciate that there is a subscribe feature where I can select a subset of the categories so that I don't get blasted with messages for things I don't care about.

That being said in my browser the UI is really bad because each feature tile has a gigantic blank white space so it takes up about three times as much vertical space as it should so scrolling down the page is very painful.

The short description on each tile is also truncated so the first sentence isn't even complete. If it were me I would allow for a lot more text on each tile. Below is an example of what one tile looks like in my browser. I suppose if I rely on the e-mail subscription then I won't ever see the home page again though as I expect to be able to click a link in an e-mail to go directly to the announcement page.

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.