Jira Service Desk 4.0.x release notes
11 February 2019
We're excited to present Jira Service Desk 4.0.
In our latest platform release, Jira Service Desk harnesses an upgraded engine that provides faster performance, increased productivity, and greater scalability. Dive in and discover all the goodies awaiting your service desk teams.
Highlights
More
Read the upgrade notes for important details about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.
Compatible applications
If you're looking for compatible Jira applications, look no further:
FOR SPEED
Lucene upgrade to power performance
A welcome change we inherit from Jira 8.0, is the upgrade of Lucene. This change brings improvements to indexing, which makes it easier to administer and maintain your service desk. Here’s an overview of what to expect:
Faster reindexing
Reindexing is up to 11% faster. This means less time spent on reindexing after major configuration changes, and quicker upgrades.
Smaller indexes
Index size has shrunk by 47% (in our tests, the index size dropped from 4.5GB to 2.4GB). This means a faster, more stable, Jira that is easier to maintain and troubleshoot.
jQuery upgrade
Outdated libraries can lead to security vulnerabilities, so we've upgraded jQuery from version 1.7.2 to 2.2.4. This new version includes two security patches, and the jQuery migrate plugin 1.4.1 for a simplified upgrade experience. Learn more
FOR EFFICIENCY
Everyday tasks, take less time
We know how important it is for agents to move through their service desk with ease, and for admins to scale their service desk as their team grows. The back end upgrade combined with a bunch of front end improvements, makes work more efficient for admins, agents, and customers alike:
- Viewing queues is twice as fast in 4.0 compared to 3.16.
- Opening the customer page is 36% faster in 4.0 compared to 3.16
- Project creation for an instance with 100 projects, is twice as fast in 4.0 compared to 3.15.
- Project creation for an instance with up to 200 projects, is six times faster in 4.0 compared to 3.15.
We'll continue to take performance seriously, so that your service desk team can get the most out of their day!
Accessible priority icons
We’ve updated our priority icons to make them more distinctive and accessible. These changes allow Jira users with color blindness, to instantly recognize the relationship between icons, and their level of importance. Here’s a comparison of old and new icons that you'll be seeing around Jira Service Desk:
New options in advanced search
Check out these new options for when you are using advanced search:
Find contributors and date ranges (updatedBy)
Search for issues that were updated by a specific user, and within a specified date range. Whether you're looking for issues updated in the last 8 hours, two months, or between June and September 2017 – we've got you covered. Learn more
Find link types (issueLinkType)
Search for issues that are linked with other issues by particular link types, like blocks or is duplicated by. This will help you quickly find any related blockers, duplicates, and other issues that affect your work. Learn more
Atlassian User Interface (AUI) upgrade
AUI is a frontend library that contains all you need for building beautiful and functional Atlassian Server products and apps. We've upgraded AUI to the more modular 8.0, making it easier to use only the pieces that you need.
AdoptOpenJDK comes to Jira
Oracle stopped providing public updates for Oracle JDK 8 in January 2019. This means that only Oracle customers with a paid subscription or support contract will be eligible for updates.
In order to provide you with another option, we now support running Jira Service Desk 4.0 with AdoptOpenJDK 8. We'll continue to bundle Jira Service Desk with Oracle JDK / JRE 8.
End of support for fugue
In Jira Service Desk 4.0, we've removed com.atlassian.fugue, and updated our APIs to use Core Java Data types and Exceptions.
You can read the full deprecation notice for next steps, and if you have any questions – post them in the Atlassian Developer Community.
FOR THRILLS
Get ready for the new customer portal experience
We're giving you more ways to customize your help center and portals, alongside a fresh new look that will brighten up your customer's day. This first-class, polished experience will be available in the not too distant future, so keep an eye on upcoming release notes. In the meantime, here’s a taster…
Added extras
4-byte characters
Jira now supports 4-byte characters with MySQL 5.7 and later. This means you can finally use all the emojis you've dreamed about! 
Here's a guide that will help you connect Jira to a MySQL 5.7 database.
Add-ons are now apps
We're renaming add-ons to apps. This changed in our Universal Plugin Manager some time ago, and now Jira Service Desk follows suit. This change shouldn't really affect you, but we're letting you know so you're not surprised when seeing this new name in Jira administration, and other pages.
Resolved issues
Issues resolved in 4.0.0
Released on 11 February 2019
Issues resolved in 4.0.1
Released on 20 February 2019, removed on 28 February 2019
Jira Service Desk 4.0.1 has been removed because of this bug.
Issues resolved in 4.0.2
Released on 6 March 2019
Issues resolved in 4.0.3
Released on 9 July 2019