How often do we ned to upgrade?

[Selcuk Savas]

Hi,

I am new in my role which introduced me to Confluence.

We are currently on version 4.1.4. I did training, reading etc and I realised that we are far behind the latest version.

I know that any upgrade might be very painfull can create hassle beyond its advantages.

How often do we need to upgrade What are the hints and tips (beyond the do backup, do on staging etc)

What is the best practice to carry on the customisation and installed plugins?

Any comment will be highly appreciate it.

Cheers,

Selcuk

[Harry Chan · Accepted solution]

Hi, I think you'll need to upgrade when you need to. It's exactly that except best to stay with Atlassian's supported platforms and supported versions.

You should allow critical security patches as they appear. You should upgrade when there are bug fixes you need, new features that will help you etc.

As to which version you go with will depend on any customisations and plugins that you have. They might not be able to let you upgrade to the latest versions.

If you do have issues managing your instance, I would suggest you consider Atlassian OnDemand or if this is not possible due to customizations etc then an Atlassian hosting provider that will be able to manage and look after all those said headaches for you. An upgrade gone wrong can be problematic.

[Harry Chan]

Hi, definitely need to start thinking about a proper plan as your instance grows and as it becomes a critical part of your organization.

As 4.3 is still very new, a lot of plugins won't be ready yet. Best to wait out.

Yes, it's possible that customizations are being done on the server. You'll need to do a comparison between the files on a stock install downloaded from Atlassian to what you have on the server to see what's changed. However, best to get someone that understands to look at it before doing anything. Be sure to take backups if you are going to do critical changes.

The upgrade time depends on the size of your instance and complexity. I can only say from experience and we generally can get Confluence instances of our clients upgraded within hours.

[Selcuk Savas]

Thank you Harry.

The service has been established in a hurry without proper handover process. Now, I try to find a way to understand an establish an reasonable upgrade plan.

As we are using Confluence in a really basic way (pretty much as a static website rathen then a wiki) we won't need to upgrade anytime soon. Having said that to be on 4.1.4 scares me as I can see that some of the plugins that we are using is not competible with 4.3.

We are currently on a support plan and I'd like to do upgrade before it end next February.

Also we had requested some customisation which have been done on the backend and I cannot view/edit them through Confluence. I assume they did the customisation directly on servers.

I have also one more question, timewise how long it takes to upgrade roughly from 4.1.4 to 4.3? Couple of hours or say weekend?

Cheers,

Selcuk