Confluence 5.5 Upgrade Notes

Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 5.5. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 5.5 Release Notes.

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Upgrade notes

Database attachment storage deprecated (Update 29/5/2014)

Database attachment storage has been deprecated in Confluence 5.5.  If you currently store attachments in the database there will be no change, but you will not be able to switch to storing attachments in the database in Confluence 5.5. 

(warning)  It is recommended to migrate database attachments from database to filesystem according to Attachment Storage Configuration as database attachment storage might cause problems with displaying/previewing attachments and videos files in newer Confluence versions starting from 5.9.

(We apologize that this announcement was missed when these upgrade notes were first published.)

No clustered version for this release

We will not be providing a clustered version of Confluence 5.5. We are working on improving our clustering solution and expect to make it available later this year. Customers wishing to run Confluence in a cluster should continue to use Confluence 5.4. 

For add-on developers: A developer milestone (Confluence 5.5-m22) of our work so far is available to developers who want start working to ensure their add-on is cluster compatible. See How do I ensure my plugin works properly in a cluster? Note this milestone is not recommended or supported for production environments, and does not include all of the features in Confluence 5.5.  

Upgrade tasks in this release

This release includes several upgrade tasks. In very large instances it may take some time to complete the upgrade. The upgrade also includes a re-index of all users. You can check the status of the index queue by going to     >    General  Configuration  >    Content Indexing > Queue Contents. The status will show as  idle  when the indexing is complete. Do not manually flush the index queue (or delete a space which automatically flushes the queue) until the indexing is complete. 

Reducing noisy notifications

We are reducing some of the more repetitive Confluence notifications. Watchers of a page or space will no longer receive a notification as each individual attachment is added to a page in the editor. 

Personal tasks tab removed from the workbox

As part of our work on tasks, the Personal Tasks tab, previously accessed from the Notifications box  in the header, has been removed. 

If a user has incomplete personal tasks, the first time they access the Personal Tasks tab Confluence will notify the user of this change and email any incomplete personal tasks to the user's registered email address. The email also provides instructions for how to add these tasks to a page so they can be managed as ordinary tasks. 

Tasklist macro removed from the macro browser

The wiki markup based Tasklist macro has been removed from the macro browser. Tasklist macros on existing pages will continue to work, but you'll be unable to add new Tasklists via the macro browser. 

Upgrade recovery file

Confluence creates a pre-upgrade partial database dump which may enable Atlassian or an Atlassian Expert to assist you with data recovery should a major problem occur during an upgrade (and you have no backup). The file created cannot be used in its raw state and and does not replace the need to perform a full database backup prior to upgrading. If you have a very large database (your database backups take a very long time to complete) and you are confident you have manually performed a full back up, you may turn off this operation. See this Knowledge base article information on how to use a system property to turn off this operation.

Changes to Administration console and cog menu

A small change has been made to the Administration console. Some options previously under General Configuration now appear on the Further Configuration page.  

See the list of all items that have moved...

These settings can now be found under Further Configuration.

  • Site Homepage
  • Threaded Comments
  •  TrackBack
  • Remote API (XML-RPC & SOAP)
  • Compress HTTP Responses
  • Open Search
  •  
  • Quick Navigation

The Cog menu has also changed. To access Confluence Admin choose   >  General  Configuration. This will take you straight to the General Configuration page in the Confluence Administration console.  If you want to administer users or add-ons there are now options in the cog menu to take you directly to those pages. 

New required system properties for importing mail and JUnit reports 

For security reasons mail and JUnit report files can now only be imported from a specified location in the Confluence server's file system.  We recommend administrators create folders in their Confluence home directory, add then specify the location for files to be imported from in the following system properties: 

  • to import JUnit reports set confluence.junit.report.directory 
  • to import mail set  confluence.mbox.directory

Mail and JUnit Test result files cannot be imported from the server until these system properties are set.  See Configuring System Properties for more information. 

Changes to source distribution for Confluence

For developers: The internal Atlassian dependencies for JIRA's source distribution are now Maven-based archives, rather than exports of the source repository for each dependency. There will be a Maven-based archive for each dependency, named <dependencyname-version>-sources.jar. For more information, see Preparing for Confluence 5.5

New supported platforms

In this release we have added support for:

  • Tomcat 7.0.x
  • MySQL 5.6.16 (due to a known issue  we are not supporting any minor 5.6 versions prior to 5.6.16)
  • Postgre SQL 9.3
  • Internet Explorer 11

End of support announcements

End of support for PostgreSQL 8.3

As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer offer support for PostgreSQL 8.3. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence for more information.

End of support for WebDAV for attachment storage

We no longer support storing attachments on a WebDAV server (this feature has been deprecated since Confluence 2.7). This does not affect the WebDAV plugin.  

Advance Notice: End of support for Tomcat 6.0.x 

This release (Confluence 5.5) will be the last release that supports Tomcat 6.0.x. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence for more information.

Advance notice: End of support for Internet Explorer 8  

To allow us to dedicate resources to providing the best experience on modern browsers, Confluence 5.5 (including minor releases) is the last release that supports Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

See End of Support Announcements for Confluence for more information.

Known issues

 (warning) If you're running Confluence with Microsoft SQL we require database collation to be set to SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS from Confluence 5.5.3 onwards. See Can't start or upgrade Confluence due to an error with MS SQL Server database collation for more information. 

Upgrade procedure

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

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 and other important directories and database. See the documentation on backing up your Confluence site. If you are using an external database, perform a database backup.
  2. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 5.4, read the   release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
  3. Download the latest version of Confluence.
  4. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade

After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:

  • Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
  • Check for answers from the community. Other users may have encountered the same issue. You can check for answers from the community at Atlassian Answers.
  • Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.

  • If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and cannot solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.
Last modified on Jul 27, 2017

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