[New] Introducing Defer Rollout: A new way to manage changes in your Cloud Enterprise organization

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community!

I'm Alex, a Product Manager on Atlassian’s Enterprise Cloud team.

I’m happy to announce that, starting today, Atlassian will offer Cloud Enterprise-entitled org administrators the ability to temporarily defer selected new changes directly within Product Updates—now available in beta!

As administrators, it’s essential to understand which new changes are rolling out to your organization and to be prepared for upcoming changes. We recognize that some changes require more preparation than others, and the limited preparation time before a change is released to end users can sometimes lead to unintended disruptions.

Starting today in beta, selected new changes in the Jira family of products and Confluence will include an option to temporarily defer, giving you additional time to prepare your organization.

Please note: Defer Rollout applies only to Enterprise-entitled products currently on Continuous track. If you do not currently have any Enterprise-entitled products on the Continuous track, you can switch one of your products to Continuous to beta test this new feature. Defer Rollout will not affect any product(s) currently on the Bundled or Preview release tracks. Additionally, you can learn more about Release tracks, Continuous tracks, and Bundled or Preview tracks here.

To access Defer Rollout in beta, please follow these steps:

1. Visit admin.atlassian.com and select your organization (if you have more than one).

2. Go to Products > Product Updates.

3. Locate Have more time to prepare for changes and click on Allow admins to defer rollouts > Allow to opt into the beta and start using Defer Rollout.

Visit Product updates > Have more time to prepare for changes

Click on Allow admins to defer rollouts > Allow to opt in

Once you’ve opted into the Defer Rollout beta, you’ll need to follow these steps to temporarily defer the release of new changes to a later date:

1. Visit Product updates and select the filter titled Defer rollout > Can defer.

Visit Product updates > Have more time to prepare for changes

Select Defer rollout > Can defer

2. Choose a release note from this view, click to open the detailed release note, and then click Defer rollout to Month Date, Year in the blue box. Confirm by selecting Defer rollout in the following prompt to temporarily defer this change until a later date specified in the release note.

Select any release note in this view with (X days left to defer)

Click Defer rollout to Month Date, Year in the blue box

Confirm temporarily deferral by selecting Defer rollout

A confirmation will appear to indicate that the change has been temporarily deferred

3. Once you’ve completed the deferral, the Rollout schedule will update with the new deferred release date. You can also click View rollout schedule to confirm or review the rollout date of this change across all your product(s).

New deferred release date in Rollout schedule

New deferred release date in View rollout schedule

Please be aware that new changes become deferrable on a rolling basis. Initially, upon opting in, there may not be any changes available for deferral, which is expected. To maximize the benefits during beta, we recommend checking back weekly to see which new features have become available for deferral.

While unlikely, Defer Rollout is currently in beta and may be rolled back at any time. If this occurs, this Community Post will be updated with details and next steps.

Have questions, feedback, or comments? Learn more in our support article or share your thoughts in the comments below!

[Boris Berenberg - Modus Create]

This looks really cool. Can you please coordinate with the DevRel team to communicate with developers on top of Atlassian APIs what our expectations should be re: how APIs will interact with deferred features?

[Joe Baldwin]

This looks great, but I do have a few questions: 

• What's the maximum length of time that a rollout can be deferred for?
• Is there any information about whether or not a product update has been deferred deferrals from customers license data? Or, will support teams simply have to ask end-users creating support tickets – who may, or may not, know they've been deferred? 
• When admins choose to defer, support teams may not be able to reproduce problems in the older versions as they may have upgraded themselves. What guidance, warnings or contingencies are available in these scenarios?