Jira Service Desk 4.2.x release notes
21 May 2019
We're excited to present Jira Service Desk 4.2 .
Highlights
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Interested in trying a shiny new version? Don't forget to renew your active software maintenance! Renew now.
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:
Sneak peek into Jira's roadmap
If you want to know when our next Enterprise release is coming, check out this Community post.
Edit custom fields in Jira Service Desk automation
We’re always thinking of ways to make automation more powerful. Our customers are often the ones who bring the brightest ideas.
In Jira Service Desk, you can create an automation rule that edits an issue when a certain trigger takes place. For example, when a high priority issue comes in you can automatically update the Assignee field to a particular agent.
We’ve now extended the list of fields you can edit to include Jira custom fields—handy for those customers who need more flexibility from their service desk, and welcome news for the 150+ users on JSDSERVER-4258 and JSDSERVER-2015 who voted for this feature.
Let’s take a look…
To learn more about the different rules you can set up, check out Automating your service desk.
Better knowledge base search experience
Self-service is a great way to empower service desk customers and give your agents some breathing space. In this release, we've introduced some improvements to the knowledge base search experience, so customers are more likely to find the right help article on the first go (if it’s been written that is!).
Complete results list with pagination
The previous experience limited knowledge base search results to just three. Now, when you search for an article on the help center, customer portal, or when you create a request, we return the complete list of results and customers can scroll through until they find what they need.
Search help
We've added a link to search help that explains how you can create an advanced search query using Confluence search syntax, like wildcards and other operators for more precise knowledge base search queries. Check out Confluence Search Syntax for the full overview.
Don't have a Confluence knowledge base linked to your service desk? Learn more at Set up a knowledge base for self-service.
Enhanced knowledge base reports
Jira Service Desk already provides reports to show how many customers are viewing and solving their own problems with knowledge base articles. We’re now giving you even more information, including:
- how many requests were resolved by agents sharing articles
- how many requests were resolved without an article
To help you act on these insights, you can drill down into the data to learn which articles were widely used and the types of requests they’ve helped solve. Information like this lets your agents know which troubleshooting guides to write more (or less) of.
Read Setting up service project reports to learn what reports are at your fingertips.
Get your hands on Jira Service Desk source code
In the spirit of openness, Jira Service Desk are excited to announce that our source code is available for customers to download, starting with version 4.2 and above.
Who can access it?
If you have a Commercial, Academic, or Starter licence you can access the source code through your MyAtlassian account, or from https://my.atlassian.com/download/source/jira-servicedesk.
Learn more about the customizations you can make to the code at Purchasing and licensing.
Color updates for issue statuses
To bring more consistency between Jira Server and Jira Cloud applications we’ve updated the colors of issue statuses. Now, when working with your issues, you’ll see the following changes:
To learn more about statuses, see Defining status field values.
Support for Java 11
Following on our promise to add support for Java 11, we’re happy to announce that it’s finally here! Java 11 is the latest Long-Term-Support release, so you’ll be able to get updates and fixes for longer. At the same time, we’ll continue to support Java 8 and bundle Jira with AdoptOpenJDK 8.
Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2017
We're welcoming another supported database to our family—Microsoft SQL Server 2017. Learn more
Updating apps has never been easier
We’ve fixed several issues that caused performance degradation in large Jira instances when installing or updating Marketplace apps. Until now, every update of an app could make Jira slow down or even freeze. If you’ve encountered this problem before, it’s much better now so feel free to update your apps anytime. You can read more about this fix at JRASERVER-64908.
Exporting all the issues you need
To avoid memory problems, Jira had a default limit of 1,000 issues when exporting to CSV. Though we’ve decided to keep the default limit in place, we’ve reduced the amount of memory needed during the export so you can increase the limit and export more issues in one go. In our tests, exporting 100,000 issues (each with 10 custom field values) required 57MB of memory compared to almost 2GB before this change. Read more about this fix at JRASERVER-66555.
You can safely increase the limit, but keep in mind that many big exports will still affect Jira performance. To change the limit, have a look at Jira advanced settings.