Confluence 5.5 Release Notes

30 April 2014

Highlights of Confluence 5.5 

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Tasks that fit the way you work

We know that keeping track of a growing to do list can be challenging, so we've given tasks a huge facelift. The new and improved tasks are perfect for when you want transparency and accountability without the weight of a full workflow.   

In a meeting or retrospective? Writing up a planning page for your project?  Now you can create tasks, assign them to people and add due dates without leaving your Confluence page. 

Simply add a task to a page to get started!

More accountability with due dates and assignees

By popular demand, tasks now have due dates.

Type // to trigger our new date picker and add a due date to your task.  The date color indicates when a task is overdue or due within the next week. 

Type @ to mention a user and assign the task to them. You can even assign a task to yourself. 

Better visibility of your tasks with the Tasks view

We've added a new Tasks view to your profile which gives you a place to see all your tasks. 

Filters let you refine your view - complete or incomplete, and tasks created by you or assigned to you. Once again, colors indicate tasks that are due soon - tasks that are due first appear at the top of the list. 

If you were tracking your personal tasks using the Personal Tasks tab in the workbox you'll need to migrate these tasks to a page. See the upgrade notes for more. 

Greater transparency with new Task Reports

There's a brand new Task Report blueprint that's perfect for keeping track of tasks that are important to your team or project. Choose Create > Task Report and follow the prompts to build your report.

You can report on tasks by the space or page they appear in, or by the people they are assigned to or created by, right out of the box.

If you want to add a list of tasks to an existing page, there's also a new Task Report macro that lets you filter tasks by location (spaces and pages), user, date, completion and much more. 

Greater control of your content

Move blog posts 

By popular demand you can now move individual blog posts between spaces.

This is useful if you accidentally create a blog post in the wrong space, or want to reorganize your spaces.

Disable the space blueprints you don't need

Are you seeing blueprints that don't really apply to your organization? Administrators can now disable specific space blueprints across the entire Confluence site.  Disabled blueprints will not appear in the Create Space dialog.  

Go to Confluence Admin > Global Templates and Blueprints.  You can disable page blueprints that don't apply to your organization there too. 

Small improvements with a big impact

Add a custom favicon

Stand out in a sea of browser tabs - upload a custom favicon image for your Confluence site.

Go to Confluence Admin > Site logo and favicon. 

Improved JIRA integration 

In Confluence 5.4 you got a taste of how well JIRA and Confluence can work together. We've continued to improve our integration with JIRA. In this release we've:

  • added support for creating JIRA Issues in projects that have required fields. There are still some limitations, but we currently support:
    • required system fields (for example Fix Version and Component).
    • text based required custom fields (number field, text field (single line and multi-line) and URL field types only).
  • added the new JIRA status lozenges - the clear design makes it even easier to see the status of your JIRA issues at a glance.
  • added the ability to display a single issue in a table, and configure the columns to include on your page.
  • improved how pages containing the JIRA Issues macro export to PDF.
  • improved column sorting.

Mentions now even easier in a page and on mobile

The @mentions autocomplete dialog now recognizes usernames and helps you distinguish between people with the same name.

You can now also mention users in your comments on mobile. Great if you like to read pages and respond to comments on the go. 

New Questions List macro 

If you use the Confluence Questions add-on, there's a new Questions List macro that lets you display a list of questions on any Confluence page. Find out more....   

Extended Page Properties and Page Properties Reports macros 

Since the introduction of blueprints, more and more customers have been using the Page Properties and Page Properties Report macros to extend existing blueprints or generate their own reports.  We've made a big change to these macros to make them useful in more situations. 

A new ID parameter can be used to identify a specific macro when you have multiple Page Properties macros on a page. This gives you the flexibility to report on all of them or only some of them. Its the best of both worlds. 

See the macros in action in the new Create a Blueprint-Style Report tutorial.

Note: The Page Properties macro no longer automatically adds a label to your page. You will need to add the label (that you plan to specify in the Page Properties Report macro) to the page manually for your page to appear correctly in the report. 

Check the health of your Confluence site

We've added a new tool to help you check the health of your Confluence instance. Go to  > General Configuration > Atlassian Support Tools > Health Checks. 

We'll be adding more checks over time, but for now you can find out if your license is valid, your application server, Java version and vendor are supported, and whether you are using the embedded HSQLDB database (which is provided for evaluating Confluence but is not supported as a production database). 

Infrastructure changes and API improvements

New REST API

We're consolidating the capabilities we currently have in multiple different APIs into a single, easy to use REST API. Over the next several releases we will be deprecating our existing APIs as equivalent resources are made available in the REST API. See Confluence REST API in our developer documentation for more details. 

AUI Upgrade

Confluence is now using AUI 5.3.4.

For a full description of these changes see our guide to Preparing for Confluence 5.5.

Credits

Our wonderful customers - we (heart) you guys!

Our customers play an important role in making Confluence better. Thank you to everyone who participated in interviews with us, made suggestions, voted and reported bugs on our issue tracker!

The Confluence 5.5 team

Say hi to the team!
Development

Agnes Ro
Ali Kord
Alice Wang
Ángel Eduardo García Hernández
Craig Petchell
Dave Loeng
David Ma
David Richard
David Rizzuto
David Taylor
Don Willis
Duy Quoc Tran
Duy Truong Luong
Edith Tom
Esther Asenjo Reyes
Giang Vo Truong
Hao Trung Ho
Hieu Ta
Huy Tuong Nguyen
Issac Gerges
Ivan Loire
Joe Xie
Julien Michel Hoarau
Kenny MacLeod
Khoa Pham
Lap Tran
Matthew Erickson
Michael Oates
Mitermayer Reis
Nabeelah Ali
Nguyen Dang
Nhi Nguyen
Niraj Bhawnani
Oliver Burn
Olli Nevalainen
Paul Curren
Petro Semeniuk
Quang Ho
Phong Quoc Le
Phong Hong Nguyen
Raymond Su
Richard Atkins
Sam Tardiff
Samuel Day
Shaun Esther
Steve Haffenden
Steven Lancashire
Ted Piotrowski
Tam Tran Minh
Thinh Quang Hua
Tin Vuu
Truong Vu
Tue Tri Dang
Tung Thanh Dang
Vu Truong Vo
Xavier Sanchez Taixe

Management

Product management 
Bill Arconati
JK Thng
John Masson
Natasha Prasad
Sherif Mansour
Spencer Norrish
Stephanie Arnaud

Product marketing management 
John Wetenhall
Ryan Anderson
Terrence Caldwell

Development management 
Matt Ryall
Anatoli Kazatchkov
Ben Mackie
Chris Kiehl
Mark Schaschke
Martin Papy  


Cross-product team

Design 
Henry Tapia
Royce Wong
Valter Fatia   

Quality assistance   
Mark Hrynczak
Glenn Martin
Hai Nguyen
Jonas Soderstrom
Phuc Thi Minh Nguyen
Son Lien Hoang

Technical writing      
Rachel Robins 

Support

Sydney support 
Michael Seager
Denise Unterwurzacher
Lachlan Dally
Dave Norton
Hossein Toussi
Saleh Parsa  

Amsterdam support 
Theodore Tzidamis
Alex Conde
Shannon Mackie
Yilin Mo

Brazil support 
Jorge Dias
Rodrigo Adami 
Guilherme Nedel
Bruna Griebeler
Giuliano de Campos
William Zanchet
Deividi Luvison 
Felipe Alencastro 

Japan support

Adam Laskowski
Seiji Morita 

Kuala Lumpur support 
Immanuel Siagian
Septa Cahyadiputra
Foogie Sim
Hanis Suhailah
Jing Hwa Cheok
Patrice Samuel Rompas
Muhammad Lazuardi Rizki 
Wayne Wong 
Suren Raj

San Francisco support 
Rick Bal
Tim Wong
Robert Chang
Brian Tom
Ann Worley

Service enablement 
Renan Battaglin

Last modified on Nov 7, 2016

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