Announcing the Next Long Term Support Release for Jira Software and Jira Service Management

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The Jira Data Center team is pleased to announce the upcoming Long Term Support (LTS) releases for Jira Software Data Center and Jira Service Management Data Center, scheduled for the last quarter of 2024.

These LTS releases are designed to offer you enhanced stability and extended support, so that your teams can focus on what they do best. With these versions, you'll benefit from the latest features, enhanced security investments, and performance improvements, all backed by our dedicated support.

We are committed to helping you make the transition as smooth as possible, and our team will be providing detailed upgrade guides and resources to assist you every step of the way.

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for choosing Jira to power your workflows.

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What you can expect

If you're upgrading from the previous LTS, the latest version will include all of our extended efforts throughout the year. Below are a few highlights, though not a comprehensive list of all the improvements in the upcoming release.

Security

• Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) in Jira Software

• Jira Software migration to REST v2

• New login flow for Jira Software and Jira Service Management featuring two-step verification

• Improved security with a websudo allowlist

• Support for the Client Credential Grant Flow in application links

• Secure backups in S3 object storage

• File extension restrictions

• Secure database passwords stored in HashiCorp Vault

• New default endpoint security annotations

• New local backup security health check 

• Velocity template and allowlist security improvements

• Reduced number of third-party libraries and improved dependency management

• Upgraded numerous Atlassian and third-party components

• Improved overall definition of the Java API

Performance and scale management

• Archive issues with Jira Automation

• Minimum required support for Java 17

• Jira Service Management

  • Archive unused Assets objects including supporting capabilities in Jira automation

  • Run multiple Assets imports in parallel

Experience improvements

• Dark theme (Beta)

• Add watchers while creating issues

• Always view the oldest or newest displayed comments first

• Update the descriptions of multiple issues at the same time

• Add linked issues to the existing ones with one click

• Jira Service Management

  • View all assets imports from one place

  • Avoid surprises with the change calendar

  • Link multiple Confluence spaces to a single portal

  • Queue favourites and inline editing

  • Restrict ability to create request types

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We appreciate you taking the time to read our Jira LTS announcement. Be sure to follow the Data Center roadmap, along with the Jira Software and Jira Service Management release notes, to see all the features included in the LTS. Bug fixes and security improvements coming with this LTS release can also be found in the release notes.

Best,

The Jira Data Center team

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Nice additions!

[Morten Stensgaard]

More than 2 years of development - And the product of Jira DC have evolved VERY little since version 9.

We now pay 5 times the licensing, what we payed for Jira Server and the new features have gone down by the same factor.

You need to start paying attention to your customer and the End users here - And you Backlog and "Gathering Interest" is more than a +10.000 list - And the input is getting larger than your output......you can't keep up with the pace.

Security and Performance at scale is NOT new features - It's actually just what your product should  ALWAYS include(to still have your customers stay with your product).

So let's dive into the actual "Features" released here:

Dark Theme
Seriously - It's still Beta......Why even then bump the Major version number to 10?!

Add Watchers while creating issues

You have just added option of adding the Watchers field to the Screen - Is that it?

Always view the oldest or newest displayed comments first

So you have added Sorting to the comments section - It's actually okay and provides value, but no huge development

Update the descriptions of multiple issues at the same time

How many actually do this?? - And this REALLY the most valuable addition you could find on your Backlog?

Add linked issues to existing ones with one click

Seriously - You have added a shortcut to the More-menu

As a paying customer, i'm highly concerned with the lack of development on DC - Even the Roadmap for the product suite looks vague and uninteresting from my End users perspective.

I suspect the whole Version 9 Roadmaps to have been 1 big security patching of the product by the development team - And still is - Because we are getting monthly Security vulnerability release more and more constant - Probably why you have version bumped a lot of dependencies and decommed old legacy parts of the codebase.

There are so many broken/missing things that would be of way higher value to the end users(Or us who admins the instance)

• Automation for Jira do not have advanced Branching - Which could help me as Jira Admin to loop over Project Leads, Jira Projects etc. to inform them of Lost/un-updated issues and so on.
• Automation for Jira do NOT support Assets in DC Products - It works in Cloud
  • The Automation module in Assets is awful and legacy in so many ways(Due to this we have hidden Assets from our End users)
• Advanced roadmaps does not support all fields - And Grouping by custom fields is also not supported - The Program level of Advanced Roadmaps is looking really bad. 
• SCIM 2.0 is not natively supported for User provisioning - And SAML SSO is very basic.
  • We ended up buying Addon for this
• The Gadgets of Dashboard is looking REEEEALLY legacy nowadays
  • We have ended up exporting to PowerBI because Dashboards are almost useless
• No easy/automated cleanup of old users, groups, filters, dashboard.
  • We ended up hooking Assets into our Jira Database to get the overview of what needs to be cleaned up - And then used the legacy automation module for some sort of alerting.

I can keep going on here - But there is 10.000 tickets on your Backlog Atlassian - Maybe you should start sorting this by the "Most end user value"(We actually vote them) - And then extract that to a proper Roadmap for the product.

I sincerely hope that version 10 will take a different path - Less vulnerabilities and more focused towards delivering value and features - similar to your Cloud product - The code is actually already in your hands......so start doing merge of your codebase into DC products.

Kind Regards

Morten Stensgaard

[Dave Mathijs]

@Divyanshi What will the version number of the new LTS be?

9.12.x/5.12.x is the current LTS dd. 29 november 2023.

[Eddy G]

It would be helpful if the next LTS version number was listed.

[Bipin Brahmanandan]

We hope this next LTS version will be 10.x.x

[Vigil Vijayan]

Just a suggestion: It would be awesome if Atlassian could host webinars and workshops to walk users through the new features, security enhancements, and performance improvements. This can help users get hands-on experience and clarify any doubts.

[Normann P_ Nielsen _Netic_]

I can only concur with Morten Steensgaard, the rise in license price and we are feed crumbles while paying for Cloud development....

As as for a version 10 its so disapointing to see that almost all features are lowed the hood (not that it is not appriciated, but much of it is just cleaning up technical debt and bad decisions from the past to enroll many open souce frameworks instead of doing some grundwork yourself). Seeing into the logfile of every Atlassian product is for me horrendous...

And using the "in beta" semantics, started by Google - and great way of saying "almost done" and excusing for a (perhaps) poor quality/funtionality... (and we are still paying a huge price for the product).

I agree that You should fix a lot of bugs and enhance some of the UI and in general make the UI faster, some other suggestions can be found at https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Data-Center-articles/Jira-Software-and-Jira-Service-Management-Data-Center-10-0-are/ba-p/2792047#U2798099

Best,

Normann 

[David Yu]

With the addition of adding watchers during creation, I hope you can also implement watchers in issue security levels to complete the circle. It's simply clunky creating a multi-user picker field as a workaround when watchers works so seamlessly, and there's still quite a lot of community interest using a deprecated add-on for this.  

[Divyanshi]

Hey everyone, we appreciate your feedback and will share it with the team.

The next LTS versions will be Jira Software 10.3 and Jira Service Management 10.3, scheduled for release in December.

Additionally, support for Jira Software 9.4 and Jira Service Management 5.4 will be extended until January 31, 2025.

[Don Erickson]

Hello @Divyanshi ,

Will the updated LTS schedule be posted on Atlassian? Or a formal communication sent out? Maybe I missed it, but that would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[Salih Tuç]

Hi @Divyanshi ,

Are there any recent news on this topic? We are planning a Jira DC upgrade to the latest LTS (9.12.14 right now) for our customer in mid-November. Should we wait for new LTS on November, or the next LTS will be 10.3 in December, as you mentioned?