Jira Service Desk 4.7.x upgrade notes
Here are some important notes on upgrading to Jira Service Desk 4.7. For details on the new features and improvements in this release, see the Jira Service Desk 4.7.x release notes.
Summary of changes
Upgrade notes
Sharing requests with the customer’s organization
As you might have read in the release notes, we’ve changed the default behavior of sharing new requests with the customer’s organization. Here’s the summary of the changes:
Customer portal: Requests raised in the customer portal will be set to private by default. If you want to share a request with your organization, you’ll need to choose it in the drop-down menu when raising a request. We did this to avoid sharing sensitive requests by mistake.
Email: Request raised over email will be shared with the organization if the reporter belongs to only one organization, so no changes here. However, we’ve added a new global setting that lets you choose whether these requests should be shared or kept private by default. You can find it by going to Administration > Applications > Jira Service Desk configuration, and looking at Organization management.
Changing how agents are treated in SLAs and automation rules
We’ve changed how agents in certain roles are treated by Jira Service Desk. Until now, agents acting as approvers or belonging to the customer’s organization were seen as customers, which affected SLAs and automation rules — when an agent (“customer”) commented on a request, the clock kept on ticking and the request status didn’t change, which brought a lot of confusion to true customers. We’ve heard your feedback and decided to change it.
This change will most likely affect your work around Jira Service Desk (hopefully for the better!), so here’s the summary of what we did:
How agents are treated by Jira Service Desk
| Agent role | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Reporter | Customer | Customer (no change) |
| Request participant | Customer | Customer (no change) |
| Part of the customer's organization the request is shared with | Customer | Agent |
| Approver | Customer | Agent |
How SLAs and automation rules are affected
The changes shown in the table are actually results. The true change occurs in the IF conditions, which answer the question of isCustomer/isAgent.
Here’s what happens to a request when an agent comments on it:
| Item | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| SLAs |
|
|
| Automation rules |
|
|
Disabling HTML in custom fields description
With Jira Service Desk 4.7 (and Jira 8.7.0), we’re changing the default behavior of the Enable HTML in custom field descriptions and list values items option. It will now be switched to OFF for new Jira installations and the upgraded ones that have never used it.
If you have modified this option, you shouldn’t be affected, but do we recommend that you check the it to make sure it's set correctly for your instance. You can find it by going to 
> System > General configuration.
We recommend that you keep this option disabled for security reasons.
PostgreSQL 11 support
We’re adding PostgreSQL 11 to our supported platforms for Jira Server and Data Center, and Aurora PostgreSQL 11.4 for Jira Data Center.
OpenID Connect support DATA CENTER
Many enterprises still struggle to use industry-standard user management tools to authenticate to Atlassian. Way back we added SAML support to all of our Data Center products and now we are adding a new authentication option through OpenID Connect integration to enable seamless integration with 3rd party Identity Providers.
For more information, see OpenID Connect.
Changes in the issue collector
The upcoming update of the Chrome browser introduces new cookie security features, which would essentially break the issue collectors embedded on separate domains. We’ve fixed this problem, but this brought some changes to how issue collectors work:
You can no longer match the submitter’s user session to make them the issue reporter. You can still match them by using their email address.
You don’t have to enable 3rd party cookies to make the issue collector work. We’ve removed this requirement, also dropping some error messages that reminded about it.
The project and issue key will no longer be displayed in the success message after submitting feedback (unless the project is open to Anyone on the web). We did this to improve security by not disclosing information about projects and issues.
For more info on the issue collector, see Using the issue collector.
End of support announcements
We’re not making any changes in Jira Service Desk 4.7, but we’ll end support for a few platforms in Jira Service Desk 4.8 and 4.10. For more info, see End of support announcements.
App developers
See Preparing for Jira 8.7 for any important changes regarding apps.
Upgrade procedure
See Upgrading Jira applications for complete upgrade procedures, including all available upgrade methods and pre-upgrade steps that are required for Jira Service Desk 4.7. For a more tailored upgrade, also check our Pre-upgrade planning tool that will recommend a version to upgrade to, run pre-upgrade checks, and provide you with a custom upgrade guide with step-by-step instructions.