Data Center Digest Q1 2024

[#1]

Hi there, Data Center community! I'm back today with the newest edition of our Data Center Digest, offering a quick overview of recent and soon-to-be-shipped highlights for our Data Center products! If you're looking for even more insight into our upcoming releases, make sure to check out the Data Center roadmap.

Long Term Support (LTS) releases

As many of you know, upgrading to an LTS release provides you with all the new features shipped since the last LTS, as well as continued access to critical security, stability, data integrity, and performance fixes for the two-year support window. Read on to discover our recently shipped and coming soon LTS releases.

SHIPPED The Jira Software 9.12 and Jira Service Management 5.12 long-term releases are now available as of November 2023! Enjoy new features like the ability to search for projects and issue types in custom field contexts, updated Jira automation, comment sorting updates, an improved commenting experience, and more. Learn about these releases in their respective LTS cheat sheet guides. See the LTS guide for Jira Software 9.12 here and Jira Service Management 5.12 here.

Make sharing new features easier: Introducing email templates for admins

Now included on all future LTS cheat sheet download pages you’ll find an email template designed to help admins quickly and easily inform end-users about new capabilities. Empower your end users to make the most of the new features available! Email templates are available on the Jira and Jira Service Management download pages linked above!

COMING SOON Bamboo Data Center 9.6 is the next upcoming Long Term Support (LTS) release for Bamboo, scheduled to be released soon. Users can look forward to several exciting new features such as user session invalidation and application tunnels to enhance security, ephemeral Kubernetes agents for improved performance and scalability, and more. Read about these features and more in the LTS announcement post.

COMING SOON Bitbucket Data Center 8.19 will be our next Long Term Support (LTS) release for Bitbucket, coming soon. Look forward to features to help your teams improve productivity and sustainable scalability such as mark files “unread” in a pull request, templates for pull request commit messages, and dark theme! Learn more about these features in the LTS announcement post.

Recently shipped and upcoming features for admins and end-users to enjoy

These are just a few of the recently shipped and upcoming features across security, compliance, performance, scale, and admin and end-user experience. For a list of recently shipped features, check the release notes for each of your Data Center products.

Product	Shipped	COMING SOON
Jira Software	Comment sort order improvements: Work effectively across devices with saved preferences for comment order. Learn more. Add watchers while creating issues: Save time while keeping your team updated by adding watchers as you create issues. No need to waste time creating an issue and then immediately editing it to add watchers! Learn more. Bulk description edit: Save time when editing descriptions for multiple issues with the new bulk description edit flow, allowing you to edit many descriptions in just a few clicks. Learn more.	Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Administrators will be able to enhance the security of user logins by enabling a second authentication layer. Automated issue archiving: Keep your instance organized and performant when you use Automation for Jira (A4J) to archive issues automatically and easily clean up your backlogs.
Jira Service Management	Parallel Assets import: Run as many parallel imports as your system can handle, whether it’s on one node or multiple nodes. Learn more. Queue inline editing: Update commonly used fields from the queue view, improving work speed and agent productivity. Learn more.	Archiving for Assets: Safely archive asset objects to effectively manage scale, increase instance performance, and improve searchability without losing important information. Secret manager integration for user directory configuration: Minimize security exposure and manage infrastructure credentials with a secret manager integration, such as AWS Secret Manager or HashiCorp Vault, for user directory configuration.
Confluence	Removal of critical severity accessibility defects: Improved ease of use for low-vision, keyboard only, and assistive technology users (including screen readers). Learn more. Bulk delete attachments: Deleting attachments one at a time is fine if your page only has a handful of attachments, but for organizations working with countless attachments on a page, it's manual and time-consuming. We’ve heard this feedback, and we're excited to add the ability to bulk delete attachments. Learn more.	Dark theme: Choose between light or dark theme as your preferred interface to help you better focus on your screen, reduce eye strain, and improve contrast for better accessibility. Content management rest APIs: Admins can more confidently manage content at scale, including the ability to script and automate updates to pages and spaces, and other administrative tasks.
Bitbucket	Dark theme: Choose your preferred color theme with dark theme now available as an option! Help reduce eye strain, enhance visibility in low-light conditions, and create a more comfortable user experience. Learn more. System commits get auto-signed with GPG: Bitbucket Data Center now supports automatic signing of commits with a system GPG key. This feature ensures that all code commits in Bitbucket have verifiable signatures, which helps users meet security and compliance standards. Learn more.	Draft pull requests: Simplify teamwork by drafting pull requests before the code is ready for review. Secure Administrator Sessions (websudo): Strengthen security with Secure Administrator Sessions (websudo), which requires administrators to re-authenticate before performing sensitive operations or accessing the Global Administration settings page.
Bamboo	Gain higher availability with warm standby clustered deployments: Bamboo will now keep all your secondary Data Center nodes running and up-to-date with the primary node at all times, allowing them to take over operations in a matter of seconds. Learn more. Secure database credentials with AWS Secrets Manager and HashiCorp Vault: AWS Secrets Managers allows you to securely store and retrieve your password at runtime. You can also authenticate with Vault using HashiCorp tokens through V2 of the HashiCorp KV Secret Engine or Kubernetes Service Account Tokens. Learn more.	Look forward to Bamboo’s next LTS release, coming in the next few weeks!

Thank you for reading this quarter’s Data Center Digest, and please remember to visit the Data Center roadmap for even more insight into our upcoming releases.

[Scott Boisvert]

FYI, the email templates for Jira appear to be corrupted and they don't download for JSM.

[Claire Chisholm]

Thank you @Scott Boisvert we're working to fix this ASAP!