Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 6.15. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 6.15 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes

Changes to the Share a link blueprint

URLs must be added to Confluence's whitelist before they can be shared using the Share a link blueprint. This is to prevent people from accidentally or maliciously sharing links that may pose a security risk to your site.  

Changes to wiki markup in search results

To speed up Confluence search, we no longer remove wiki markup from search results. If you're currently using a wiki markup macro on a page, the syntax may show up in search results snippets, for example: ||*Page owner*|[~jsmith] || 

This won't affect how markup appears anywhere else in Confluence — we'll still render it as rich text on the page.

New version of the Atlassian Companion app

We released a new version of the Atlassian Companion app on 22 March 2019, including some minor bug fixes and improvements. If you distribute the Companion app using the Microsoft Installer (MSI), you'll need to download the latest version to get these updates. Head to the Companion app release notes page for details.

New option when you import a space or site from Cloud

We've added a new checkbox to the Backup and Restore page to prepare for a change that will be coming to Confluence Cloud over the next few months.   

Currently when you import a space from Confluence Cloud, we use a person's username to reunite them with their pages, comments, and any other content. Soon, Confluence Cloud will replace usernames with email addresses, which means we will only be able to match user accounts based on this email address.

When importing a space, you will be able to skip attributing content to user accounts with matching email addresses, and instead attribute all content to 'unknown user'.  See Import a space from Confluence Cloud to learn more about these changes. 

Note: the new checkbox won't do anything while the Cloud export still contains usernames that match your usernames in Server. 

Supported platforms changes

No changes to supported platforms in this release. 

Confluence 7.0 is coming

It's been just over two years since we released Confluence 6.0, and the time has come for us to start sharing some of our plans for Confluence 7.0.

Platform releases like 7.0 are an opportunity to make bigger changes, including removing rarely used or under-performing features. While these changes can be disruptive in the short term, they provide us with essential opportunities to improve the user experience, performance, and stability of Confluence.

Your feedback during this process is really important to us, which is why we are sharing our plans with you now.

Head to Planned changes in Confluence 7.0 for details of features we're considering removing. Formal end of support announcements will be made closer to the release of Confluence 7.0.

Infrastructure changes 

For developers

Head to Preparing for Confluence 6.15 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

End of support announcements

Advance notice: removal of CDN dark feature

The unsupported Confluence CDN dark feature confluence.fixed.cdn.enabled will be removed in Confluence 7.0. We recommend you turn off the dark feature, and remove it from your setenv.sh or setenv.bat file.  We're currently exploring ways to bring official CDN support to Confluence Data Center, so stay tuned. 

Advance notice: removal of JUnit report macro

We will remove the JUnit report macro in Confluence 7.0. Any usages of this macro will display as 'unknown macro'. 

Advance notice: attachment storage configuration

We will hide the Attachment Storage Configuration option in the Confluence 7.0 admin console, if you're already using the only supported attachment storage option (file server).

Advance notice: shortcut links

We will end support for shortcut links in Confluence 7.0. 

Advance notice: trackback and referrers

We will remove trackback and referrers functionality in Confluence 7.0. 

Advance notice: orphaned pages

We will remove the Orphaned Pages option in Space Tools in Confluence 7.0. 

Advance notice: Hipchat integration

We will end support for Hipchat integration in Confluence 7.0. The Hipchat integration plugins will be disabled by default for new sites from Confluence 7.0. 

Advance notice: IM Presence macro

We will end support for the IM Presence macro in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this macro will still work. 

Advance notice: Network macro

We will end support for the Network macro in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this macro will still work. 

Advance notice: Search Results macro

We will end support for the Search Results macro in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this macro will still work. 

Advance notice: Space Details macro

We will end support for the Space Details macro in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this macro will still work. 

Advance notice: Activity stream gadget

We will end support for the Activity stream gadget in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this gadget will still work.  

Advance notice: Confluence page gadget

We will end support for the Confluence page gadget in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this gadget will still work.  

Advance notice: Confluence Quick Nav gadget

We will end support for the Confluence Quick Nav gadget in Confluence 7.0, and hide it from the macro browser. Existing instances of this gadget will still work.

Advance notice: News gadget

We will remove the Confluence Quick Nav gadget in Confluence in Confluence 7.0. Any existing usages of this gadget will show an error.

For more information on all of these notices, see End of Support Announcements for Confluence. 

Known issues

• Users can't edit files using the Atlassian Companion app in some browsers. See Can’t edit files in Confluence Server using Atlassian Companion app in Internet Explorer, Edge, Firefox, or Safari
  
• Synchrony will not start on Windows with AdoptOpenJDK jdk8u212 or  See CONFSERVER-58784) for a workaround.
• There is a known issue where site exports cannot be successfully imported because some data is missing  See  CONFSERVER-58556 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for more information.  We do not recommend relying on site export as a backup in 6.15.7 or earlier. You should regularly back up your database, and local home directories manually. 
• Confluence 6.15.3 introduced a bug which caused emoticons and some other SVG files to not display correctly. We've withdrawn this release as a result. See  CONFSERVER-58180 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for more details, and a workaround if you are affected. 
• If you use Apache to limit who can access the admin console, you should update your configuration. See Using Apache to limit access to the Confluence administration interface for our suggested configuration.
  
• There is a known issue where read-only mode attempts to write to <shared-home>/confluence.cfg.xml , but the file doesn't exist in the shared home directory. This problem affects sites that have been previously upgraded from Confluence 6.0 or earlier. See Could not save access.mode into the shared confluence.cfg.xml file error after upgrading to Confluence Data Center 6.10
• There is a known issue where some fonts that Confluence relies on are not available in older Linux distributions. See Confluence UI shows garbled or corrupt text on CAPTCHA, macros and/or diagrams due to missing fonts. 
• There is a known issue where the "hibernate dialect" property was being incorrectly retained after upgrade. Customers who have been using Confluence since version 2.4 or earlier (legends!) should check the hibernate dialect in their <confluence-home>/confluence.cfg.xml file before upgrading to Confluence 6.x to avoid this error: Upgrading fails with ERROR The size (16777215) given to the column 'event' exceeds the maximum allowed for any data type (8000) in Confluence.
• There is a known issue when upgrading Confluence with an Oracle database. Oracle users should upgrade their driver to 12.2.0.x before upgrading to Confluence 6.1 or later. See Upgrade to version 6.1.x Failed With Error "ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded" 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're already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Go to > Support Tools > Health Check to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
2. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
3. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 6.14, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
4. Download the latest version of Confluence.
5. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

Update configuration files after upgrading

The contents of configuration files such as server.xml, web.xml , setenv.bat / setenv.sh and confluence-init.properties change from time to time. 

When upgrading, we recommend manually reapplying any additions to these files (such as proxy configuration, datasource, JVM parameters) rather than simply overwriting the file with the file from your previous installation, otherwise you will miss out on any improvements we have made.

Upgrading from Confluence 5.x?

Collaborative editing is made possible by the magic of Synchrony. When you install Confluence Server, Synchrony will be configured to run as a separate process on your server.

If you're upgrading from Confluence 5.x, there are a few requirements you need to be aware of:

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 Community.
• 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 can't solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.