Confluence 8.0 (Server and Data Center) released

[#1]

Hey there, Data Center community!

I'm Mauricio Franzoni and I am one of the Product Managers for Confluence Data Center. I’m excited to share that Confluence 8.0 for Server and Data Center is now available! This platform release provides breaking changes and platform-level improvements for Confluence, including security and compliance enhancements, increased performance and scalability, and new end-user productivity capabilities.

As you know, platform releases drive significant value as they allow us to include multiple backward-incompatible changes (or “breaking changes”) which establish a foundation for continuous improvement in future releases. Read on to explore how Confluence 8.0 empowers growing enterprises to remain confident in their security while enabling users with productivity features optimised for easy collaboration.

Security

Confluence continues to evolve to meet your security needs. With updates and improvements made to strengthen the overall security posture of the platform, the 8.0 release brings our most secure Confluence yet. These updates, along with those detailed in the release notes, help protect your critical applications and valuable data.

• Platform 6 in Confluence 8.0 upgrades our stack of third-party dependencies, resolves technical debts, and supports Java 17.

• Architectural upgrades to Confluence's foundational technology like Selenium, Lucene, and Hibernate give you a more capable Confluence that will improve the overall security posture of the platform.

• Newly upgraded features such as a Log4j2 and Struts2 strengthen our security measures against external threats.

Performance and Scale

Confluence 8.0 brings administrators more visibility into operations, increased control over data, and a higher performant instance, leading to more productive work through speed and ease of use. Confluence 8.0 increases performance at scale through a number of features, including:

• The import/export feature, which provides a better way to manage space content.

• The Copy Space feature, which allows you easily scale your instance with copy space.

• Improved search functionality for more relevant search results; as your pages and spaces continue to grow, reliable search becomes essential.

Productivity and Usability

By removing friction in workflows and providing ease of use improvements, Confluence 8.0 brings users the ability to communicate with ease, and do it in their preferred medium. To increase the speed at which people can collaborate, we are adding highly-requested features to the 8.0 series such as:

• The inline editor/comment functionality, allowing users to more easily collaborate by editing and actioning comments simultaneously in Confluence.

• An improved emoji experience to better convey messages.

We know many of you are excited to upgrade, and I encourage you to stay tuned as we communicate details about our next Long-Term Support (LTS) for Confluence in the new year.

Thanks for being part of our Data Center community and please share any questions or comments below! In the meantime, you can head over here to download the latest version of Confluence or read the Confluence 8.0 release notes to learn more.

Feel free to share any questions or comments below!

Thank you!

The Confluence Product team

[Steve Letch]

Can we get an ETA on the docker file on dockerhub for those of us using Helm? thanks

[John Dunkelberg]

@Mauricio Franzoni - I'm really interested in the item "The inline editor/comment functionality, allowing users to more easily collaborate by editing and actioning comments simultaneously in Confluence." and I'm not seeing that in the release notes linked.  Am I missing it somewhere?

[Mauricio Franzoni]

HI @john thanks for your question. The inline editor/comment functionality is coming as part of the Confluence 8.x series but has not yet been released. I’m so happy to hear you’re looking forward to it! Looking at our DC roadmap, we have that feature planned for calendar year 2023 Q2. Hope that helps.