Data Center Digest Q2 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, 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

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 Bitbucket 8.9 LTS

Bitbucket's Long-Term Support release became available on April 12, 2023. In this release, you'll find 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 new features available, check out the Bitbucket 8.9 release notes.

COMING SOON Confluence 8.5 LTS

We recently announced that the next LTS for Confluence is planned for Q3 2023. Packed with benefits to empower growing enterprises to remain confident in their security while enabling users with productivity improvements for easy collaboration, this LTS will include features like the ability to view inline comments in edit mode, an improved emoji experience, updated Confluence search ranking logic, and more. To learn more about the features available, check out the Confluence LTS announcement post.

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Are you taking advantage of zero downtime and rolling upgrades?

When preparing for your next upgrade, make sure you're taking advantage of your enterprise-grade Data Center features, such as zero downtime upgrades (ZDU) and rolling upgrades.

Roll out security updates, new version releases, and bug fixes to your Atlassian Data Center products without ever having to pull your instance down. With ZDU for Jira and rolling upgrades for Confluence and Bitbucket, you can save money, time, and secure your instance. See these features for yourself by checking out this demo! Or read about ZDU here and rolling upgrades here.

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New product value and experience improvements

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 Custom field updates for Jira Software

Jira Software now offers highly requested changes to custom fields. The modifications are designed to assist administrators in managing and configuring custom field contexts more effectively. This upgraded functionality also includes a new design that allows for the quick and efficient configuration of all necessary settings. Check out the Jira Software 9.7 release notes to learn more.

Shipped Auto-managed sprints for Jira Software

You can now schedule a sprint to start and complete automatically. The Auto-managed sprints feature automatically begins and ends sprints based on the date you add to the sprint detail. Save time and reduce risks associated with human error with this new automation. Check out the Jira Software 9.8 community post and demo to learn more about this new feature.

Shipped App vendor checks for Jira Software and Confluence

For those of you preparing for your cloud migration, we've developed a new feature for Jira Software and Confluence to make the migration process easier. App vendor checks provide extra verification tailored to each app, providing you with warnings and guidance on resolving potential problems related to your migration. Learn more about App Vendor checks.

Shipped Comments and attachments for approvals in Jira Service Management

With these two new features now available in Jira Service Management, users can leave comments and attachments during approval. Include an explanation of why a request is declined, or attach additional evidence needed to support an approval. Check out the Jira Service Management 5.7 release notes to learn more about comments and the Jira Service Management 5.8 release notes to learn more about attachments.

Shipped Read-only inline comments for Confluence

The ability to view inline comments in edit mode is now available in Confluence 8.3. Enable a more seamless collaborative experience for end users by allowing them to view, resolve, and navigate inline comments while in edit mode. Check out the Confluence 8.3 release notes to learn more.

Shipped Site and space import/export improvements for Confluence

The import and export process has received a number of upgrades with significant improvements to speed and reliability. It now provides admins with more visibility and control over site and space import/export tasks when moving data between Confluence instances. Check out the Confluence 8.3 release notes to learn more.

COMING SOON Automate issue lookup for Jira Software

Build automation using results from look-up issue JQL query search. Whenever you want to get a list of issue keys to include in a correspondence, do routine checks on a group of issues, or just get a count of issues matching a condition, lookup issues is the component to use.

COMING SOON Clone a queue in Jira Service Management

Quickly configure new and/or similar queues by cloning existing queues with predefined configurations. Project admins can save time and increase productivity by copying an existing queue to use as a template for a new and similar queue.

COMING SOON Sharing requests with a group in Jira Service Management

Project admins will soon be able to add Jira groups as customers of their projects. They'll no longer need to rebuild this grouping of internal help-seekers (employees) within organizations or manually add each member as a request participant to grant them access to requests—simply share requests with the group itself.

COMING SOON Single space indexing in Confluence

This new feature will allow administrators to re-index a specific space promptly, instead of performing a complete re-index that could take hours to complete and propagate. This enhancement significantly boosts productivity because it helps the admin get the instance back on its feet sooner, speeds up troubleshooting times, and fixes issues related to search in a speedy manner.

COMING SOON Enforced project settings in Bitbucket

Implement project settings that restrict repository admins from altering configurations that could potentially affect security or compliance. This new feature ensures that all projects adhere to a unified set of standards and eliminates any confusion with regards to compliance.

COMING SOON Resolvable comments for Bitbucket

Reduce the time spent evaluating pull request comments with the new resolvable comment feature. This allows users to clearly understand which pull request comments have already been addressed and which need to be addressed.

COMING SOON Ephemeral agents for Bamboo

Scale on demand and strengthen Bamboo’s security with build isolation using ephemeral agents. Each execution of a Bamboo job or deployment environment will run on a newly created remote agent hosted through Kubernetes.

Accessibility Updates

Accessible design allows people of all abilities to 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 Service Management and Bitbucket accessibility features

Discover a more enhanced labeling system in Jira Service Management and Bitbucket. In Jira Service Management, button labels have been revised to provide more precise definitions of roles and functionalities and improved descriptions of filter results and search scenarios. In Bitbucket, additional labels have been included to encompass comment-related functionalities, roles, and attributes.

COMING SOON Bamboo and Crowd accessibility features

On Bamboo and Crowd, improvements and updates will soon be available for low-vision and keyboard-only users.

Thanks for reading this Data Center Digest, and please remember to visit the Data Center roadmap for even more insight into our upcoming releases.