Unlock the value of Confluence’s most recent LTS release

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Hi Data Center Community!

I’m excited to share all of the new features and capabilities available in the most recent long-term support release, Confluence 8.5. If you’ve already upgraded to the 8.5 release, you still won’t want to miss this cheat sheet to make sure you are aware of and taking full advantage of all the features that were made available to you in your upgrade.

Keep an eye on this space for an upcoming downloadable PDF version of this cheat sheet for easy sharing. 

Optimize for efficiency and effectiveness

The Confluence 8.5 long-term support release (LTS) comes packed with improvements to meet your organization’s most critical needs in security and compliance, performance and scale, and product experience.

The benefits you’ll unlock with Confluence 8.5 will help your organization to operate effectively, remain agile, and continue to support your evolving business. Read on to make sure you’re taking advantage of all the new features and capabilities available to you in Confluence 8.5.

Enhanced security and increased compliance

Confluence 8.5 comes equipped with upgraded libraries and accessibility improvements to help safeguard your data and enforce compliance protocols. Our most secure offering yet, the updated platform reduces the risk of on-the-rise data breaches, cyberattacks, and other security threats while keeping your instance more stable and reliable.

• Accessibility improvements: Enable all users to work more freely with several accessibility fixes, including improvements for our screen reader and keyboard-only cohort. (7.20)(8.0)(8.1)

• Library upgrades: Strengthen your security with upgrades to many Atlassian-maintained libraries and several important third-party libraries including React, Hibernate, Struts, and Log4j. If vulnerabilities are found, these upgrades help us move quickly to help keep your instance as secure as possible. (8.0)

• Improved Platform: Ensure you’re backed by the most up-to-date set of approved and supported libraries across the Data Center product including a wide range of bug fixes and additional capabilities in our platform to be built on into the future. (8.0)

Optimal performance and stable scalability

As your organization grows, your instances do too, but that doesn’t mean performance has to suffer. The newest release includes automation and data optimization features for Confluence to empower growing teams to develop more complex instances without compromising performance.

• Architectural upgrades: Unlock a more capable Confluence with updates to our foundational technology, allowing us to release more powerful products, faster. (8.0)

• Move pages without breaking or losing attachments: Moving pages within spaces or to different spaces is now more reliable, has better performance, and is less prone to errors with attachments as we’ve developed a more robust way of storing attachment data. (8.1)

• Store attachments on Amazon S3 object storage: Efficiently scale your team’s increasing data footprint by keeping attachments in Amazon S3 object storage (8.1)

• Automate user management tasks with REST APIs: Automate staff onboarding and off-boarding and perform security group synchronization activities with new REST APIs. (8.2)(8.4)

• Improvements to backup and restore: Explore the enhanced backup and restore experience, which boasts faster, more reliable performance and a modern interface. (8.3)

• Copy space: Eliminate the need for additional apps or workarounds to duplicate a space, its themes, templates, or permissions thanks to a new, out-of-the-box way to copy your spaces and space settings. (8.3)

• Single space re-indexing: Save time by enabling administrators to re-index a specific space rather than requiring a full re-index, minimizing disruption to search for your teams. (8.4)

Flexible infrastructure

Whether you’re preparing for an upgrade, expanding your current infrastructure, or working across deployments, Confluence 8.5 is ready to help self-managed teams deploy flexibly on an infrastructure that meets your unique needs.

• Support for Java 17: The Atlassian platform has been upgraded to version 6, and supports Java 17 in Confluence 8.x. (8.0)

• New log for Cloud migration data: Find a dedicated migration log at Atlassian-confluence-migrations.log to track your Cloud migration progress. (8.1)

Convenient Data and Insights

Maximize the value of Confluence with features designed to empower organizations to quickly make data-informed decisions. Optimize system performance, create reports, and streamline issue resolution to keep up with your fast-paced business.

• Add Jira’s Advanced Roadmaps to Confluence: Create richer project reports to engage stakeholders, and give other teams an up-to-date look at your current progress. When you save changes to your plan in Advanced Roadmaps, they’ll automatically update on all places where it’s embedded in Confluence. (7.20)

• Create new feedback reports: Create feedback reports that help our support team analyze collaborative editing problems, ultimately resulting in more accurate diagnosis and efficient resolution of content problems for your team. (7.20)

• More diagnostic tools: Solve issues quickly with the right data when you need it. Confluence is equipped with even more tools to capture, detect, and resolve performance-related issues, such as Java Flight Recorder and email debugging. (7.20)

• Manage your license usage: Get a clearer picture of unused or idle accounts consuming your license to manage your license usage more effectively. (8.0)

• New diagnostic metrics through JMX monitoring and log file: Access new database connectivity and HTTP connection metrics through JMX monitoring for efficient in-product diagnostics and timely resolution of performance issues. (8.1)

Improved user experience

Enjoy a more user-friendly Confluence with productivity and ease-of-use improvements for both admins and end-users. Accomplish tasks more efficiently and effectively and save precious time in your day.

• Dark theme for Confluence iOS mobile app: Enable dark theme in the mobile app to make working in Confluence easier on your eyes by using a darker, higher-contrast color theme. (7.20)

• Skip links: Jump ahead on your Confluence page with our new skip links feature. Instead of tabbing your way through a long list of navigation links, we’ve enabled skip link shortcuts across our pages, and in the editor. (7.20)

• Brand new emoji experience: Access all the emojis you’ve come to expect online and the option to upload custom emojis. Across multiple releases, we’ve introduced more ways for your teams to engage, react, and express themselves in Confluence. (8.0)(8.1)(8.4)

• Improved localization of date lozenge: See dates in the correct format for your language setting with several improvements to the accuracy and display of the date lozenge. (8.0)

• Search and find what you need with less fuss: Find what you’re searching for with less filtering, thanks to an updated Confluence search ranking logic. (8.0)

• Emoji autocomplete: Quickly find the emoji you're searching for when you type its name or shortcut into the editor. (8.2)

• Manage inline comments in the editor: Allow users to view and resolve inline comments while in edit mode. (8.3)

• View inline comments button: Never miss an inline comment again as they’re easily discoverable on the page you’re viewing under the new ‘view inline comments’ option in page tools. (8.3)

• Align table content vertically: Bring visual harmony to your tables with the ability to align any type of content to the top, middle, or bottom of a table cell. (8.4)

• Manage uploaded emojis: Control the custom emojis your users are adding. This feature enables system admins to view and delete custom emojis and disable the upload emoji feature for users across their instances. (8.4)

Ready to upgrade? Get started here.