Catch all the admin and user value coming in the next Jira Software Long Term Support release

[#1]

Hi, Jira community! I’m Anna, part of Atlassian’s Jira Software product team. We recently announced the next long term support (LTS) release for Jira, and I wanted to share a bit more detail about some of the admin and user value that will be available in that release.

Jira Software 9.12 will be the final long term support release for Jira Software server. Please upgrade to Data Center before the server end of support on February 15, 2024. You do not need to update your server version in order to upgrade to Data Center.

Streamlined workflows and automation for end users

This LTS release includes several new features to improve the end-user experience, including multiple accessibility updates. This includes:

• Pinned comments to help you always have the essential information from issue comments on hand.
• A sticky comment footer to add a comment from any place in an issue without scrolling down the page.
• Auto-managed sprints empower you to start and complete project sprints automatically on set dates and at a fixed time.

Learn more about these and the other features in the release notes.

With the pin comments feature, you can pin up to 5 comments to the top of the Comments section in Jira issues. Also, a sticky comment footer in the issue view allows you to start writing a new comment from any place, no matter how many comments are already there. No more scrolling up and down on the page to find the most important information or the text box for adding comments! 

With the auto-managed sprints feature, Jira will automatically start and complete sprints for a scrum master or project admin based on the sprint settings. If an auto-completed sprint has remaining open issues, Jira will move them to the destination selected in the settings. This removes the risk of forgetting to start or complete a sprint — saving time and helping teams work more efficiently!
Watch this demo.

In addition to these updates, we continue developing out-of-the-box Jira automation. The lookup issues action and create variables component, available in Jira Cloud, will empower your teams and support use cases that were difficult or even impossible in Jira Data Center and server before.

You can test some of these use cases in the cloud-based Automation playground:

• Configure a daily Slack summary of issues
• Get customer feedback from Slack or any other third-party app you integrate with
• Set up a daily pulse
• Send an email reminder when a task is near dues

Check more automation templates.

Improved performance and stability for admins

Jira Software 9.12 also includes many new features ready to improve the admin experience, including:

• New mail queue metrics for in-product diagnostics will provide more details of mail queue contents for better performance checks.
• A new health check for email performance will catch issues in mail queues so that they can be resolved timely and no delays occur.
• The ability to take index snapshots manually at any time will make you free from the default scheduled index snapshots.
• A grand custom field configuration rework will improve your experience with setting up contexts for custom fields and provide the ability to control the visibility of system and custom fields that have no value, streamlining issue management and improving efficiency.

Jira Software is introducing new mail queue metrics for more effective in-product diagnostics through JMX. The new metrics provide a more detailed picture of mail queue contents and an ability to collect more data for better performance monitoring.

In addition to overall performance improvements, we’ve implemented a new health check for monitoring email performance, preventing email delays, and ensuring emails are sent from mail queues without issues.

If you need to reindex Jira and want to create an index backup, you can now take an index snapshot manually with one click at any time, avoiding the default scheduled index snapshots.

A full reindex is usually required after modifications to Jira custom fields. For this LTS release, we’ve revamped the whole experience of configuring custom field contexts within the massive admin custom field configuration uplift. You’ll get a completely new user experience with advanced customization options, including improved visibility settings for system and custom fields, updated search, drag-and-drop for managing items in contexts, multi-select functionality, and visibility of “just added“ items.

Of course, admin and user value is just the beginning of what we’re including in the LTS! Follow along with the Data Center roadmap, as well as the Jira Software release notes, to check all the features that will be included. The release notes also outline various bug fixes and security improvements coming with this LTS release. Thanks for being part of the Jira community, and we look forward to sharing this release!

Best,

Anna and the Jira Software Data Center team

[Saralie S.]

Thank you for the update!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this. I would love Auto-managed sprints and pinned comments and health check for email performance on Jira Cloud ...

[Hana Kučerová]

Thank you, pinned comments look great!