Confluence 2.7 has improvements for administrators and end-users alike. Administrators can set up trusted communication between Confluence and JIRA. The result? The JIRA Issues and JIRA Portlet macros will show only the issues which the Confluence user is authorized to see. You no longer need to include a username and password in the markup code.

The two-tier administrator permissions allow system administrators to delegate some functions to team leaders or managers. Logging is simplified, and administrators can change logging levels at runtime. The improved user management framework speeds up your user searches.

Sorting of images is now possible in the Gallery macro. And when creating a page or news item, you can attach images or files immediately, without waiting until you have saved the page.

Refer to the release notes for details of the features, improvements and bug fixes in this release.

On this page:

Upgrade notes

Plugins

If you are using any third-party plugins, please test them thoroughly before rolling 2.7 into production.

Configuring Resin

This note applies if you are using the Resin application server. Due to an upgrade to one of the core components of Confluence (namely Spring), it will no longer work against an out-of-box configuration of Resin. To resolve this, you will need to configure Resin to use an XML parser that is XSD-aware. More information:

•  Troubleshooting a Resin configuration
• Spring Framework documentation

Trusted communication between JIRA and Confluence

Confluence 2.7 provides a new trusted communication protocol, to allow secure authentication for the JIRA Issues and JIRA Portlet macros.

When upgrading, consider whether to disable warning messages or turn off trusted communication altogether. You may like to do this if you have a number of existing JIRA Issues or JIRA Portlet macros in your Confluence pages, and you do not intend to set up trusted communications soon. Read more about configuring trusted communications.

By default, trusted communication will be enabled when you upgrade to Confluence 2.7. This will affect your existing macros as follows:

• If the macro markup contains a username and password, the functionality is unchanged.
• If you have already set up trusted communication with a JIRA instance, the macro output will be as described in the guide on trusted communication.
• If the macro markup does not contain a username and password and you have not set up trusted communication with a JIRA instance, your Confluence pages will show a warning message above the macro output. See more information on troubleshooting.

WebDAV attachment manager deprecated

The option to store Confluence attachments on a WebDAV server has never worked in a useful fashion, and has not been maintained for many versions.

The WebDAV attachment manager is deprecated from Confluence 2.7, and will be removed from a future version of Confluence. If you store attachments on external WebDAV servers, we recommend that you migrate to file-system or database-backed attachment storage immediately. Refer to CONF-9313 and CONF-2887.

This DOES NOT affect the operation of the WebDAV plugin.

User migration

Confluence 2.7 replaces OSUser with AtlassianUser as the underlying user management framework, greatly improving performance. Read more information about  Manage Users.

When you upgrade from an earlier version of Confluence to release 2.7.0 or later, your users will be automatically migrated to AtlassianUser (but see the exceptions in the next paragraph). You may notice that your upgrade takes longer than usual, due to this migration process.

Automatic migration will not occur if any of the following is true:

• You have delegated user management to either JIRA or LDAP, or you have changed your user management from the standard configuration. If this is the case, you should upgrade as usual, ensuring that you retain your existing atlassian-user.xml or osuser.xml file.
• You have already migrated to AtlassianUser.

The progress of the migration will be shown in your log files. For example, a successful migration will show:

2007-10-08 21:33:07,979 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] userMigrationStarted Starting user migration. 12288 users to migrate.
2007-10-08 21:33:09,784 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] userMigrated 100 users migrated out of 12288.
...
2007-10-08 21:36:18,304 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] userMigrated 12100 users migrated out of 12288.
2007-10-08 21:36:20,112 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] userMigrated 12200 users migrated out of 12288.
2007-10-08 21:36:21,562 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] userMigrationComplete User migration complete.
2007-10-08 21:36:35,957 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] groupMigrationStarted Group migration started. 44 groups to migrate.
2007-10-08 21:36:35,960 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] groupMigrated 10 groups migrated out of 44.
..
2007-10-08 21:36:38,055 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] groupMigrated 40 groups migrated out of 44.
2007-10-08 21:36:38,208 INFO [main] [atlassian.confluence.upgrade.OSUserToAtlassianUserMigrationUpgradeTask] groupMigrationComplete Group migration complete.

System Administrator and Confluence Administrator permissions

Confluence 2.7 brings two administrator-level permissions in place of one. The new permissions are 'System Administrator' and 'Confluence Administrator'. 

When you upgrade to version 2.7, all users and groups with the old 'Administer Confluence' permission will be converted to the new 'System Administrator' permission. The powers of the 'confluence-administrators' group remain unchanged.

Location of Confluence logs

Confluence's default logging behavior has changed with Confluence 2.7. Both the Confluence and Confluence EAR/WAR distributions follow the same default behavior:

• When you start Confluence, log entries will be sent to the application server logs until Confluence has completed its initial bootstrap. Any log entries will be repeated into the <confluence-home> log described below.
• Once the initial startup sequence is complete, all logging will be to <confluence-home>/logs/atlassian-confluence.log. For example: c:/confluence/data/logs/atlassian-confluence.log.
  Note that the default location is now the Confluence home directory instead of the application server's log file.

Java versions

Confluence 2.7 supports Java 1.4, Java 5 and Java 6. We recommend Java 6 because of its increased performance and easier troubleshooting, due to enhanced memory dump and profiling capabilities.

Advance notice: Java 1.4 will be deprecated in a future release. Confluence 2.8 will be the last version that supports Java 1.4.

Upgrade procedure

If you are already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your confluence.home directory and database.
2. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 2.6.x, read the release notes and upgrade guidesfor all releases between your version and the latest version. In particular:
   
   • If you are upgrading from 2.1 or earlier, please read the 2.2 release notes.
   • If you are upgrading from a version earlier than 2.6.0, please read the 2.6 upgrade notes.
3. Download the latest version of Confluence.
4. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.