Here are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 7.5. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 7.5 Release Notes. 

Upgrade notes

Changes to audit logging

New API endpoints

As a result of introducing the Advanced auditing feature, we've added new REST endpoints.

Audit log migration

When you upgrade to Confluence 7.5, we’ll migrate your existing audit log (up to 10 million records). Depending on the database you're using and the size of your current audit log, it may take several minutes to migrate all the data to the database. The migration runs as an upgrade task before Confluence starts up.

Once Confluence restarts, we’ll run an additional heath check via the Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support Tools app to check you have enough free disk space available to the local home directory to accommodate the new audit log file.

If you find when testing your upgrade, that the migration takes a very long time, or causes performance issues on your server or database, you can adjust the batch size and thread limit using the following system properties. 

• legacy.audit.migrator.num.threads
• legacy.audit.migrator.batch.size

Differences with migrated events:

• Audit events prior to 7.5 didn’t record space data, which means migrated events will only appear in the global audit log, not the space audit log.
• Any affected objects related to a migrated event, such as spaces, pages, and users, will appear as plain text, rather than an active link.

Setting coverage levels

The new audit log allows you to choose which events are logged in different audit areas, such as general configuration and administration, user management, security, and so on.

After you upgrade, these levels will be set to Base by default, which is the lowest level of coverage.

With a Data Center license, you also have the option to increase your coverage to Advanced (for a more detailed audit record) or Full if you want to log everything. See Audit log events in Confluence for the full list of events.

Page properties report page limit

The Page Properties Report macro displays a maximum of 500 pages. If there are more pages to display, we now show a message to let the user know that we're showing the 500 pages most recently created or edited, and provide a link to Advanced Search so they can see all matching pages.

Limited mode has been removed from the collaborative editing admin screen

Since the introduction of Collaborative Editing in Confluence 6.0 we've made a lot of improvements to make it easier for you to get up and running with collaborative editing with less effort.

Limited mode was intended to be used as an emergency stop-gap when a Synchrony problem prevented your users from editing. It provided a very poor editing experience for end-users, and we've found that few customers have used it. To simplify the administration of collaborative editing even further, we've decided to remove limited mode. From now on, collaborative editing is either on (shared drafts, multiple people on the same page) or off (multiple personal drafts with basic merging for conflicts).

If you need to turn collaborative editing off, your users will be able to access the content of any shared drafts that they had not yet published from the Drafts page in their profile. Once collaborative editing is turned back on, they'll be able to resume editing these shared drafts. 

Import from Word file size limit

In order to prevent out of memory errors, we now limit the uncompressed size of files imported into Confluence using the Import from Word feature to 20 MB. You can use the confluence.word.import.maxsize system property to increase or decrease this limit. 

Can't build Confluence from source code in 7.5.0

There's a known issue where you can't successfully build Confluence 7.5.0 from the source code. We aim to have a fix for this in 7.5.1.  In the meantime, see CONFSERVER-59847 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for a workaround. 

Change to how you configure your mail server in the Confluence distribution

In Confluence 7.0 we upgraded JavaMail to version 1.6.2 which unfortunately contained a bug that affected some customers. To fix this issue, in Confluence 7.5 we've upgraded to version 1.6.4 of JavaMail, which is now known as JakartaMail. 

If you set up your mail server using a JNDI location (in the server.xml ), when you upgrade to Confluence 7.5 or later you will need to move the following files from <confluence-install>\confluence\WEB-INF\lib to <confluence-install>\lib:

• jakarta.mail-x.x.x.jar 

• javax.activation-x.x.x.jar

• javax.activation-api-1.2.0.jar

The javax.mail-x.x.x.jar and javax.mail-api-x.x.x.jar files are no longer required, and no changes should be required to your server.xml. 

Upgrading from 6.3 or earlier

If you are upgrading from Confluence 6.3 or earlier, there's a known issue where spaces do not appear in the space directory. You'll need to reindex your site after upgrading to fix this. 

End of support announcements

End of support for several databases 

As previously announced, the following databases are no longer supported:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2014
• PostgreSQL 9.5

End of support for Internet Explorer 11

As previously announced, to allow us to continue to take advantage of modern web standards to deliver improved functionality and the best possible user experience across all of our products, we have ended support for Internet Explorer 11. 

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

Infrastructure changes 

Head to Preparing for Confluence 7.5 to find out more about changes under the hood. 

Known issues

• There is a known issue when running Confluence with MySQL 8.0.29 and later due to a change to the UTF8 alias in MySQL. We're working on a fix, but if you have Confluence 7.3 or later, you can change the character set and collation to UTF8MB4 to avoid this issue. See How to Fix the Collation and Character Set of a MySQL Database manually.
• Synchrony will not start on Windows with AdoptOpenJDK jdk8u212.  See CONFSERVER-58784) for a workaround.
• 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. 

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.

Upgrade procedure

Always test the upgrade in a test environment before upgrading in production.

To upgrade Confluence to the latest version:

1. Go to Administration menu , then General Configuration > Plan your upgrade and select the version you want to upgrade to. This will run the pre-upgrade checks.
2. Go to Administration menu , then General Configuration > Troubleshooting and support tools to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more.
3. If your version of Confluence is more than one version behind, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
4. Back up your installation directory, home directory and database.
5. Download the latest version of Confluence.
6. 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.