Data Center Digest Q3 2023

[#1]

Hi there, Data Center community! I'm Claire, part of the Data Center product 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 releases

As many of you know, upgrading to a Long Term Support (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. Here are some of the new and upcoming LTS features:

SHIPPED Confluence 8.5 is now available and packed with benefits to empower growing enterprises to remain confident in their security while enabling users with productivity improvements for easy collaboration. Be sure to check out new features like the ability to view inline comments in edit mode, an improved emoji experience, updated Confluence search ranking logic, and more. Read about Confluence 8.5 in the release notes.

COMING SOON The Jira Software 9.12 and Jira Service Management 5.12 long-term releases are coming soon! With the new LTS releases, your teams can enjoy benefits built to scale your software, streamline your workflow, and supercharge teamwork. To learn more about the features that will be included, check out the Jira Software and Jira Service Management LTS announcement post.

COMING SOON The Bamboo 9.6 LTS release is coming in Q1 of 2024. We’re building Bamboo 9.6 to help accelerate developer productivity, improve the admin experience, and strengthen security. Look forward to great new features like Ephemeral Kubernetes agents, cloud application tunnels, and user session invalidation. Read about these features and more in the LTS announcement post here.

COMING SOON Bitbucket Data Center 8.19 will be our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, planned for Q1 of 2024. Look forward to features to help your teams get their best work done, such as mark files “unread” in a pull request, templates for pull request commit messages, and easy identification for licensed users. Learn more about these features in the LTS announcement post here.

Are you taking advantage of zero downtime and rolling upgrades?

When it comes time for your 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.

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

Over the last year, the Data Center teams have focused on investing in the areas our customers have asked for most. Below, we’ve highlighted some of the advancements we’ve made in security and compliance, performance and scale, and upgrades to the admin and end-user experiences. To see additional features not highlighted here, be sure to check out the Data Center roadmap, and for a full list of recently shipped features, see each product’s release notes.

Product	Shipped	Coming soon
Jira Software	New actions added to Jira automation: Lookup issues to query for issues and aggregate results for use in other actions. Create variable to store text values or other smart values and use them in other actions. S3 object storage: Store Jira attachments in AWS S3 Object Storage for better scalability, security, and availability.	Updated view field configurations: Save time by easily navigating field configurations in the admin experience. Comment sort order improvements: Work effectively across devices with saved preferences for comment order.
Jira Service Management	Link multiple Confluence spaces to a single portal: Build a comprehensive knowledge base and allow agents and customers to access a wider range of articles for self-service and free up agents’ precious time. Get Data for any time slice: Project admins and agents can now analyze data for custom time periods by selecting specific date ranges in addition to the preset options.	Queue inline editing: Update commonly used fields from the queue view, improving work speed and agent productivity. Starred queues: Agents can now star queues, increasing the visibility of queues that matter to them.
Confluence	Space reindexing: Save time by reindexing a specific space rather than running a full site reindex in Confluence. Captions for images: Add captions to images on pages and blogs to give readers more context and information. Use AWS Secrets Manager to manage your database credentials: Use AWS Secrets Manager as an additional encryption method to protect the values in the confluence.properties file and rest assured that your Confluence instance is protected from credentials leakage.	Removal of critical severity accessibility defects: Improved ease of use for low-vision, keyboard-only, and assistive technology users (including screen readers). Support for OpenSearch: Experience faster search and indexing performance with OpenSearch in Confluence Data Center.
Bitbucket	Automerge of pull requests: Improve developer productivity by merging pull requests automatically. Identifying signed and unsigned commits: Monitor the security of commits at a glance and quickly react to any suspicious changes to your code.	Dark theme: Choose between dark theme or light theme. Alternative color themes can help to reduce eye strain and improve contrast for better accessibility. Draft pull requests: Simplify teamwork by drafting pull requests before the code is ready for review.
Bamboo	Safeguard your deployment environments against unapproved releases: Set release approval policies for your deployment environments to ensure that a bad release can't take down your whole production environment.	Improved high availability: Improved performance at scale with high availability. Increase Bamboo’s reliability and redundancy and minimize the impact of a primary node going down.

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.

[Mark Thomas]

Why isn't the incorporation of ProForma on the roadmap? Or is this yet another tax on Data Center users?

[Chelo Moreira]

Another good question,
Why not to add addon jar files in s3?
It is great that we can now have attachments and avatars in s3, but we are still stuck with NFS because of the addons. Is that something that will be coming or not?

[Reese]

> Why isn't the incorporation of ProForma on the roadmap? Or is this yet another tax on Data Center users?

Cough... or Work Management....