Data Center Digest Q1 2023

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Hi there, Data Center community! I’m Claire, part of the Data Center marketing team here at Atlassian. I’m excited to share our latest Data Center Digest, providing you with a quick overview of recent and soon-to-be-shipped highlights for our Data Center products!

Please visit the Data Center roadmap for more insight into our upcoming releases and join us on March 14th, 2023 for a webinar highlighting some great new features coming to Data Center! Registration for this webinar will be live later this month; be sure to stay tuned to the Data Center community page for updates and the registration link!

Platform Releases

Platform releases include important breaking changes that allow us to lay the foundations for enhancements and features in future releases.

SHIPPED Confluence 8.0

Confluence 8.0 was Data Center’s latest Platform release, shipped in late November. This release empowers growing enterprises to remain confident in their security while enabling users with productivity features optimized for easy collaboration, such as the introduction of the new emoji experience and improved search functionality. Read all about all the great features that shipped with Confluence 8.0.

Long Term Support (LTS) releases

Upgrading to a Long Term Support release provides you with continued access to critical security, stability, data integrity, and performance fixes for the two-year support window.

SHIPPED Bamboo Data Center’s first LTS release

We have launched our very first Long Term Support release for Bamboo! In addition to the benefits of an LTS release, Bamboo 9.2 includes a variety of features offering security and performance improvements designed to help you work more efficiently. This release will support better performance and enhanced security through features like improved webhook-based integration with Bitbucket Cloud, support for Java 11, and cold standby high availability. For a full list of updates, check out the Bamboo LTS release notes.

COMING SOON Bitbucket LTS

We are nearly ready to go live with our upcoming Long Term Support release for Bitbucket, targeted for release in CY23 Q1. This release will include powerful features such as improvements to Bitbucket Mesh, archiving to help you declutter unused repositories, and secret scanning to notify you of accidentally exposed tokens, private keys, passwords, or environment variables. To see all the features available, read the Bitbucket LTS announcement.

Jira and Confluence LTS PDFs

Don’t miss out on these PDFs showcasing the full Long Term Software release value for Jira and Confluence! Easily see the full scope of new features and value that are unlocked when you upgrade to the most recent LTS.

Jira Software & Jira Service Management

Confluence

New updates and product features

Check out this list of recently shipped and upcoming feature highlights from the Data Center product roadmap to learn what’s new and what’s coming for your favorite products.

SHIPPED Guardrails for Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management has released guardrails to help you better manage your scaling team. Guardrails are product-based documentation and strategic recommendations designed to educate and help you avoid reaching a tipping point at which your instance might start to experience performance impacts. Guardrails will help you identify and mitigate scale risks, and make decisions about cleaning up your instance. Guardrail documentation can be found here.

SHIPPED Improved email filters for Jira Service Management

The Jira Service Management team has released improved email filtering to help keep your agents focused on delivering exceptional service experiences. With improved email filtering, allowlists and blocklists ensure agents are receiving the emails they need, block the ones they don’t, and gain back valuable time agents would’ve spent digging through their inboxes searching for missing requests. Watch the demo to learn how to enable this feature.

COMING SOON Safeguards for Jira Software and Jira Service Management

Coming soon to Jira Software and Jira Service Management are newly expanded Safeguards, designed to limit the number of issue-related entities to ensure scale and stability. Safeguards help by providing a means of setting global limits on the number of specific product entities for an instance to maintain performance.

COMING SOON App Vendor checks for Jira Software and Confluence

For those of you preparing for your Cloud migration, we are developing a new feature for Jira Software and Confluence to make the migration process a little bit easier. App Vendor Checks provide extra checks, tailored to each app, that will provide you with warnings and guidance on how to resolve potential problems related to your migration.

COMING SOON Custom field updates for Jira Software

The upcoming Jira 9.7 release will include long-awaited changes to custom fields designed to help admins better manage and configure custom field contexts. We’re bringing improvements to the context configuration page, ensuring better performance and faster interaction with the feature. The enhanced functionality also comes with a new design to help you configure all the needed settings quickly and efficiently.

COMING SOON  Read-only inline comments for Confluence

Coming soon to Confluence is a highly requested feature designed to inspire more productive work. The view inline comments in edit mode feature allows for an easier collaborative editing experience between end users, by allowing users to view, resolve, and navigate inline comments while in edit mode.

Accessibility Updates

Accessible design lets people of all abilities interact with, understand, and navigate our products. We are continuing to optimize our products with accessibility updates to empower all people to work independently.

SHIPPED Jira accessibility features

People with limitations will have more freedom to work independently in Jira Software, as Jira 9.6 is the first version unblocked to all three disability cohorts working with Atlassian products. Updates include:

• Customers who use shortcuts to navigate through headings will understand the page content structure more effectively.

• Screen reader users will be able to distinguish the currently active page from the list of navigation links.

SHIPPED Confluence accessibility features

Fixes have been made within Confluence 8.1 for an improved experience for screen reader and keyboard-only users. Updates include:

• Keyboard-only users now have improved usability of the Status macro toolbar in the editor, enabling the full functionality of this toolbar.

• Screen readers will announce in correct and logical order on the Advanced search page and announce the list of macro suggestions activated by the shortcut "{" in the editor, remediating the issue of 7multiple

COMING SOON Jira Service Management and Bitbucket accessibility features

Coming soon to Jira Service Management and Bitbucket is an improved experience for low-vision users, keyboard-only users, and assistive-tech users. People with limitations will have more freedom to work independently with new accessibility blocker remediations.

Thanks for reading this Data Center Digest and please remember to visit the Data Center roadmap for even more insight into our upcoming releases. Be sure to register for our Data Center Roadmap highlights webinar, available to watch live on March 14th 2023 to learn more about new features and benefits available to you soon on Data Center.