29 November 2022

We're excited to present Confluence 8.0.

Highlights

• An emoji experience that’ll make you :-)
• Search and find what you need with less fuss
• Manage your license usage more effectively
• Spotlight on platform inclusivity
• Set your team up for success

 

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More

Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.  

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Welcome to Confluence 8

It’s been almost three years since Confluence 7.0 came along and improved the way we work together. Since then, we’ve added a range of features related to diagnostics, analytics, and security to empower admins, introduced zero-downtime upgrades, and improved accessibility.

In Confluence 8, we're continuing to invest in the future of Confluence by providing solutions for the growing needs of modern enterprise organizations. This includes greater visibility of license usage for admins, an intuitive emoji editing experience for authors, and a refined search ranking logic so you see more recent and relevant results.

As a platform release, Confluence 8 also lays the technical groundwork for future improvements to performance and scale. It’s an opportunity to modernize and upgrade our platform for things to come.

We're thrilled to enter the Confluence 8 era. We have many new and exciting features planned, and whether you upgrade now, or wait for the Long Term Support release in the new year, we hope you’ll join us for the ride.

An emoji experience that’ll make you :-)

For: DATA CENTER SERVER

We’ve made improvements to the emoji that we hope will get the from your team.

The emoji menu introduces a quick and easy way for you to access emojis when words just won't do. Browse and insert emojis directly from the editor toolbar into your pages and page comments. You can also open the emoji menu using new keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Shift+M (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+M (Mac).

Teams that have migrated their HipChat emoticons from Confluence Server to Data Center will be able to see these in the emoji menu.

We're working hard to bring you a full suite of emojis in a future release to help your team celebrate, empathize, react and meme-ify to its fullest potential. Watch this space!

Search and find what you need with less fuss

For: DATA CENTER SERVER

As your pages and spaces continue to grow, reliable search becomes essential.

Find the pages you're looking for with less filtering thanks to some small updates we've made to the Confluence search ranking logic.

Here's how we've tweaked the ranking logic:

• user profiles, spaces, pages and blogs will be prioritised higher than other content types such as images and files to enable faster collaboration

• recently created or modified items from the last year, and especially the last week, will be strongly prioritised

• titles that match the search terms will be boosted twice as high as keyword matches in the body content

We’ve also made the search ranking logic more transparent by adding a page that explains how Confluence ranks search results. Learn how Confluence ranks search results

Manage your license usage more effectively

For: DATA CENTER SERVER

As a Confluence admin, you can now get a clearer picture of unused or idle accounts consuming your license to manage your license usage more effectively.

Easily track your licensed user count, and access a list of licensed users and their last login details so you can make informed decisions about your license, and the people that use it.

Head to  Administration  > General Configuration> License Details to check it out.

Spotlight on platform inclusivity

For: DATA CENTER SERVER

With Confluence increasingly used by widespread and diverse teams, our priority is to modernize the platform to be inclusive and provide equal access for every person on your team.

You'll find these improvements in the latest version:

• Accessibility fixes for low-vision and keyboard-only users
  Continuing our accessibility journey, we've resolved over 25 issues related to screen reader support and keyboard navigation that will enable users to perform essential tasks within Confluence.
• Improved localization of date lozenge
  See dates in the correct format for your language setting with several improvements to the accuracy and display of the date lozenge. Learn how to configure time and date formats

Set your team up for success

For: DATA CENTER SERVER

Platform releases give us a chance to make bigger, breaking changes to Confluence. While these changes may seem fairly insignificant on the face of it, in reality they unlock a huge amount of potential for Atlassian to ship great improvements that help your team get work done in Confluence.

• Atlassian platform and third-party library upgrades 
  The Atlassian platform has been upgraded to version 6, and will support Java 17 in Confluence 8.x. We’ve also upgraded many Atlassian-maintained libraries, and several important third-party libraries including React, Hibernate, Struts, and Log4j. These upgrades help us leverage recent improvements, and move quickly if vulnerabilities are found in these libraries in future.

• Removing deprecated code
  Over the years we've deprecated a large number of code paths and libraries, however they remained available in the code. This means it was still possible to rely on outdated technology. We've now removed much of what was deprecated in Confluence 7.x. This means all apps must switch to newer, recommended methods that will improve the overall health of Confluence and its apps.

Full details of all these changes can be found at Preparing for Confluence 8.0. If you’ve developed your own apps, integrations, or other customizations, we recommend you allow some time to thoroughly test them before upgrading.

Resolved issues

For full details of bugs fixed and suggestions resolved, head to Jira.

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Get ready to upgrade

Before you upgrade, check out the Confluence 8.0 Upgrade Notes for important changes in this release, then follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your site.

Credits

Our remarkable ecosystem...

Huge thanks to all our app vendors and solution partners. Platform releases can be tough, and we appreciate all your feedback and the hard work involved in making your apps compatible.

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!