Confluence 6.5 Release Notes
1 November 2017
We're pleased to present Confluence 6.5.Highlights
- Keep your site shipshape
- Small changes with a big impact
- Exclusive to Data Center
- Resolved issues
- Get ready to upgrade
More
Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.
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Keep your site shipshape
Whether you're just preparing to come aboard, or you've been skippering a site for a while now, we want your experience administering Confluence to be smooth sailing.
In this release we've focused on improving how you set up and maintain your Confluence site.
Easier database setup
Getting your initial database setup right can have a huge impact on your Confluence site over time. When setting up Confluence for the first time, you'll now see:
- a simple form to help you connect to your database
- a test connection button to make sure everything is spot on before you proceed, including things database collation, character encoding, isolation level and permissions
- the option to use a connection string, if you want to power-up and include additional parameters.
To keep things simple for new administrators, the option to use a datasource will only appear if Confluence detects the datasource in your Tomcat configuration.
While these changes have no impact on existing installations, we know this will help new administrators set up their database correctly first time, and avoid problems down the track.
Helping hand when things go wrong
If you've been administering Confluence for a while, you may have seen the yellow error that appears when Confluence can't start up. We've thrown that one overboard and updated the page so it's now easier to see that Confluence is not running and, more importantly, why it's not running.
We have more improvements planned, including additional info to help you resolve issues as you encounter them, so stay tuned over the next few releases.
Atlassian Notifications keep you in the loop
One of the best ways to keep your Confluence site on course is to upgrade regularly.
The new Atlassian Notifications system add-on provides targeted in-app notifications in Confluence. These notifications will be mostly directed at administrators and provide information about things like new Confluence versions and upcoming license renewals.
Head to Administration 
> Manage apps and search for Atlassian Notifications if you want to disable these notifications.
Small changes with a big impact
Sometimes it's the small improvements that have the biggest impact on your working day.
Email threading in more places
Seeing email notifications in one thread or conversation can make keeping up with your team's Confluence activity much easier. We've improved Confluence's email threading so that page edit, like and comment notifications are grouped together.
Some notifications, such as sharing a page, mentions, requesting access to a page, or recommended updates emails aren't grouped, to make them prominent in your inbox.
Here's how the same notifications would look in an unthreaded and threaded view:
Attachment indexing performance
We're continuing to improve Confluence performance, and in this release we've focused specifically on making sure attachment indexing is performed as efficiently as possible. These changes should also reduce the time required for a site reindex. Read more about how this change might affect your site in the Upgrade Notes.
Exclusive to Data Center
If you're running Data Center, Confluence 6.5 has some great improvements for you.
Synchrony for Data Center made easy
We now have a set of simple scripts to help you start and stop Synchrony for Confluence Data Center instances.
You'll find the new scripts in your Confluence <install-directory>/bin/synchrony directory. Simply move the scripts to your Synchrony node, insert the values for your environment, and you're ready to go.
If you're running Confluence Data Center in a Linux environment, there's also now an option to run Synchrony as a service.
Head to Configuring Synchrony to find out more.
Azure deployment option for Data Center
Our new Azure deployment template is ready for you to take for a test drive. The template automates provisioning a new Confluence Data Center cluster in Microsoft Azure. Head to Getting started with Confluence Data Center on Azure to find out how it works.
We've still got some work to do, including an app for the Azure marketplace, but we'd love your feedback on our work so far. Raise an issue to tell us what you think.
Resolved issues
For full details of bugs fixed and suggestions resolved, head to JIRA.
Get ready to upgrade
Before you upgrade, check out the Upgrade Notes for important changes in this release, then follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your site.
Credits
Our wonderful customers...
You play an important role in making Confluence better. Thanks to everyone who participated in interviews with us, made suggestions, voted, and reported bugs!