Just released: Confluence Server and Data Center 8.5 Long Term Support (LTS) release

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👋🏼 Hello Community!

We know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting the next Confluence Server and Data Center Long Term Support (LTS) release. We’re excited to announce that Confluence 8.5 is now available!

ℹ️ Why choose a Long Term Support release?

Upgrading to a Long Term Support release provides you with continued access to critical security, stability, data integrity and performance fixes for the full two years before this version reaches its end of life. It enables you to move quickly when a high-impact bug fix, or security fix is ported over and released for upgrading.

What to look forward to in Confluence 8.5

The Confluence teams have focused on building great user value by shipping product improvements and new features, as well as tackling high-impact items/bugs, to ensure we have a high-quality, high-value release.

New to the Confluence LTS, 8.5 includes a performance benchmarking report. This report compares the performance and scalability of the Confluence Data Center 7.19 LTS release with the 8.5 LTS release.

As with all LTS releases, we aim to provide the same, if not better, performance. The good news is that Confluence Data Center 8.5 LTS testing demonstrates largely stable performance across the product, with a few improvements.

Confluence 8.5 includes all of the improvements and features that we’ve shipped since Confluence 7.19, our last Long Term Support release, including:

Benefits for admins	Benefits for everyone
Enterprise scale New user management REST APIs Improvements to backup and restore speed, reliability, and UX Introducing space reindexing Bundling and improvements to copy space Move pages without breaking or losing attachments Easier workflows to manage license usage	Editor experience Manage inline comments in the editor Align table content vertically Brand new emoji experience Add Advanced Roadmaps in Jira to Confluence
Diagnostics and troubleshooting New diagnostic metrics through JMX monitoring and log file New Cloud migration log Create feedback reports to troubleshoot content problems Troubleshoot effectively with more diagnostic tools	Search experience Improvements to search ranking logic
Platform performance upgrades Upgrades to platforms and libraries Support for Java 17	Accessibility improvements Over 90 issues were resolved to improve product accessibility, including: Skip links Fixes for low-vision and keyboard-only users

Planning your upgrade

As a quick reminder for those customers currently on Confluence 7.13, the end-of-life (EOL) date for Confluence 7.13 support has been extended until 31 August 2023 to give you more time to plan your upgrade.

We encourage you to move to 8.5 as soon as possible. Atlassian will continue to provide assistance if you encounter issues related to upgrading from your EOL version to a supported version.

We understand upgrades can take some planning, here’s a round-up of resources to help you prepare:

• Pre-upgrade planning tool

• Confluence 8.5 Release Notes

• Confluence 8.5 Upgrade Notes

• Confluence 8.5 Long-Term Support Release Change Log

Looking for the release? You can download Confluence 8.5 from our Confluence Server & Data Center Download Archives.

Feel free to share any questions or comments below.

Thank you from the Confluence product team!

[Bryan Guffey]

Extended to 8/31/2023? That's only 7 days away!