Confluence Server & Data Center 7.0 is here!

[#1]

Hello Community 👋🏼

I’m Makisa, a product manager on Confluence Server and Data Center. Confluence Server & Data Center 7.0, our latest platform release, is now available and we wanted to share the good news with you!

Having been at Atlassian for a while, I know it’s not every day that we get to deliver a platform release. Platform releases, or “x.0” releases, are an opportunity for us to invest in the future of the Confluence platform.

So what’s in 7.0? We’ve focused on delivering value to admins and enterprises in this release - here’s a quick look at the updates you can expect when you upgrade:

A platform that’s easier for admins to maintain

• Two new scheduled jobs help keep Synchrony data under control: A soft eviction job runs regularly, and proactively cleans up any Synchrony data that's no longer required, keeping your Synchrony database tables from growing too large over time. A hard eviction job is available for when you need to ensure data such as personally identifiable information is removed from Synchrony within a specific timeframe.

• Upgrades to key components of Confluence ensure the product remains lean and easy to work with for our teams, app vendors, and, most importantly, admins. We also addressed technical debt by removing 72,000 lines of deprecated code, so we can build and improve features more effectively for you in the long term.

Enterprise needs

• Content delivery network (CDN) support for Confluence Data Center means you’ll be able to improve latency and meet the needs of your distributed teams. Using a CDN with Confluence Data Center accelerates the experience of your remote users (e.g. page load time), while also reducing the peak load on your primary application instances.

Easier upgrades

• We've introduced a “Plan your upgrade” page in the admin console to help you prepare for your upgrade. Once you’ve upgraded, we’ve also provided a “Latest upgrade report” so you can check that Confluence, app links, and apps are good to go. Both pages are available for customers running Confluence 6.5 and higher, just make sure to update your Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support Tools system app (typically bundled with Confluence) to the latest version.

And that’s not all! We know many of you are excited to upgrade to the 7.x series, and we will be communicating details about our next Enterprise release for Confluence in early 2020.

We’ve already started work on the Confluence 7.x series, and we’re excited to share these updates for Confluence with you soon. Thanks as always for your patience and feedback!

To find out more about Confluence 7.0, check out these resources:

• Our launch blog

• Our launch webinar - tune in next week for a live Q&A with myself and my colleagues

• 7.0 Release Notes

• 7.0 Upgrade Notes

[Thomas Kreft]

In the 7.0 Upgrade Notes it says: "Edit in Office workaround is not available". At the same time there's no word of a fix for Companion App for Terminalserver Environments. Any news on this?

[Benjamin Horst]

Why name a product "Data Center" if it's actually "Enterprise". 

Including the Ultimate Permissions Manager in Data Center only has about as much to do with a "Data Center" version as the archiving in Jira. In addition the Permissions Manager is not available in the Marketplace now for your less gifted customers. Switching back to the horrible Permissions Screen doesn't look like a step forward to me. 

But I am excited to see the new things this platform release will enable you to do for Confluence Server users in the feature!

[Ada Chen]

Hi @Benjamin Horst - Thanks for the feedback - we're glad you're excited for the platform release! I wanted to clarify that we have enterprise offerings that serve customers across all 3 of our deployment options, so it would be a bit of a misnomer to solely refer to "Data Center" products as "Enterprise" ;) 

We take many considerations into account when we make product decisions, including our acquisition and integration of Ultimate Permissions Manager. For more details on how we decide which features are available in Server & Data Center products, please see our blog: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/prioritizing-features-server-data-center

[Benjamin Horst]

Hi @Ada Chen - thanks for the clarification. I didn't know about that document. Now that I read it, I still fail to understand why the Permission Manager made it's way to Data Center only.

>Features that will benefit end users or project, repo or space admins, like mobile apps for our products, will go into both offerings.

The app was clearly aimed at space admins in my eyes. Of course I could use it as a system admin. But not in my role as a system admin but only in a role when I am administering spaces. 
Who is the main role that this feature/app is aimed for in your eyes?

[Ada Chen]

Hi @Benjamin Horst - While the features in Ultimate Permissions Manager did benefit space admins, we believe the primary use case more closely aligns with the global admin role. Global admins need to be able to control content in Confluence for a variety of reasons, some of which include organization-wide privacy and compliance.

Your feedback on this topic is valuable to us, and we will take it into account as we work on permissions improvements for Confluence Server customers, too.

[8006]

After we upgraded Confluence to version 7.0.1, neither Page View Tracker nor Confluence Copy Space Plugin worked properly.

[Ada Chen]

Hi @8006 - Sorry to hear, please submit a support ticket so our team can investigate!