Confluence Server Upgrade from 6.0.6 to 6.9.0

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Hi,

We're looking forward to upgrade our Server Confluence soon to the latest release (as of now 6.9.0).

We are currently at 6.0.6, which will reach EOL in the next months.

Has anyone yet upgraded to 6.9? I'd like to know your experience, specifically any changes or things to look-out for? (such as design/functionality changes  - as Cloud implemented new design removing the old direct page navigation from the side panel)

I am already reading through the release notes, but any practical thoughts/experiences, what did you like/not like would be appreciated.

Br

[Davin Studer]

If you have the ability you should set up a non-production version of Confluence that you can test upgrades on. You can get a developer license in my.atlasssian.com to use in a non-production version.

As for the differences they are mainly cosmetic. They have not gone to the weird sidebar model that they have in the cloud version which is good. So, the main differences that we saw were that the colors are different, the iconography has changed slightly. The only thing that really bugs me about the new AUI is that tabs don't look like tabs anymore. You can see what they look like in the AUI documentation.

They have not moved anything around, so everything should still be in the same place as what you are used to.

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Hi David,

Exactly the answers I was looking for.

We always work with 3 parallel environments (at least) and Atlassian applications are no different.

We have a dev env, staging/test env and prod so we can easily test the one jump upgrade in dev first.

Glad to hear the new UI isn't present in server. I opened a trial cloud instance and to tell you the truth I didn't like the new design. It's not for me , but I have a strong feeling I would be dealing with a lot of angry users lol.

Many Thanks

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

Go with the release note first of all. One more point is do not jump right from 6.0 to 6.9.

Take a middle path - upgrade to versions between them. Such an approach minimizes compatibility issues.

I would strictly discourage you from making such a huge leap as there are a number of huge releases between 6.0 and 6.9

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Hi,

I didn't went through all of the releases, yet. I will.

After going through all I think if there are >1 major upgrades between the deltas I guess we'll have to split.

Else, I think we can try and pull it off at once :)

Do you have anything in mind that could block this?

Thanks

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

Go through some known issues too - just yesterday someone reported that he/she was not able to access confluence after upgrade.

I have faced one such moment after upgrade - there could be multiple reasons for not being able to access confluence.

I for one had issue because of reverse proxy - but as it was one of the known issues I had it rectified in no time.

But well - it's a learning process, you will face unknown issues but ultimately you will figure out the solution too.

There have been bigger challenges when people switch over to databases of another type - I need to face the challenge, haven't done one yet but read it somewhere , quite challenging thinking about types , formats and compatibility. 

[Gezim Shehu [Communardo]]

Good Advice. Known issues and workarounds should help.

I feel relieved that no database change is in our plans though :).

We've already upgraded our PostgreSQL version prior to any software upgrades.

Thanks