The remote issue links feature provides a powerful way to link JIRA issues to items external to your JIRA installation, residing on external applications.

Along with a Java and REST API to add these links, end users can also:

• Add an issue link from a JIRA issue to an issue on another JIRA site, including reciprocal links between these issues.
• Search for a Confluence page from a JIRA issue and add an issue link to that page.
• Add an issue link from a JIRA issue to any web page URL, such as a page of documentation, a technical note, or any other page on another web site.

Screenshot: Sharing a list of issues with other users

Screenshot: Mentioning a user in an issue comment

Need someone else to take a look at a JIRA issue or a list of issues?

• View any issue or a list of issues on the issue navigator, click the Share button at the top-right (or type s) and specify JIRA users (based on their names or user names) or any email address of people you want to share the issue with.
  
  Recipients will be emailed a link to the issue (or a list of issues 'shared' via the issue navigator).
  

• When creating, editing or commenting on an issue, simply mention other JIRA users in an issue's Description or Comment field.
  
  Any JIRA users mentioned on an issue will receive details about the issue in an email message (sent to the addresses registered with their user accounts). The message's subject line will indicate that the person who used this feature 'mentioned' them on that issue.

Please Note:

• You require the Browse Users global permission to access the Share button or the 'suggested users' feature when 'mentioning' a user. However, if you know the username of a JIRA user, you can still mention them without this permission.
• JIRA system administrators will need to configure JIRA's outgoing SMTP mail server for the 'share' and 'mentions' features to work.

JIRA 5.0 lets you create and edit issues and sub-tasks much faster. Creating and editing is now performed in a dialog box (rather than a separate form), so that you do not need to leave the current page or have it reload just to start creating or editing an issue or sub-task.

You can customise fields on the Create Issue/Edit Issue dialog boxes by removing or adding fields fields through the Configure Fields button. JIRA remembers your last set of field choices, giving you a personally customised dialog box that presents you with your most commonly used fields whenever you create or edit an issue.

'CHANGED' operator introduced

Introduced in JIRA 4.4.3, JQL's CHANGED operator can accept the optional predicates FROM, TO, ON, DURING, BEFORE, AFTER and BY, and can be used on the Status, Assignee, Priority, Reporter, Resolution and Fix Version fields.

For example, this link shows all the issues logged against the JIRA project on our 'jira.atlassian.com' site, whose Fix Version field was changed to "5.0".

Screenshot: Activity stream gadget showing activity
from other Atlassian applications

Screenshot: Activity stream gadget showing activity
from non-Atlassian applications

We have expanded the Activity Stream features introduced in JIRA 4.4 with:

• The ability to show external activity from another Atlassian application (such as Confluence, FishEye/Crucible and Bamboo) via an Application Link.
• The ability to combine this external activity into an Activity Stream gadget on a JIRA dashboard.
• An API for creating entries in activity streams from remote applications via the REST API or locally via Java.

Refer to the Preparing for JIRA 5.0 section of our developer documentation site for more details.

With these new features, you can:

• See Confluence page updates from your activity streams in JIRA, then drill down into those Confluence pages for more information.
• See updates from another JIRA site. For example, activity streams on your development team's JIRA site (behind the firewall) can include activity on your support team's customer facing JIRA site.

Introduced in JIRA 4.4.1, JIRA administrators have the ability to change the ownership of or delete other user's shared filters and dashboards. A shared filter or dashboard is a filter/dashboard created (and hence, owned) by a user, which the user has then shared with others.

Since JIRA only allows the editing or modification of shared filters/dashboards by their owners, this new JIRA feature is especially helpful in situations where a user has left an organisation, but the shared filters or dashboards they created continue to be used by others within the organisation.

Following on with improvements to the Administration User Interface (UI) in JIRA 4.4, JIRA 5.0 provides further improvements to the Administration UI by converting forms on various Administration pages to convenient dialog boxes.

For example, the form for adding users is now a dialog box, which is accessed by clicking Add User on the Users page of JIRA's Administration area.

In addition to the dialog box for adding a new user, the 'Attachments' and 'Workflows' pages have been redesigned and the forms associated with these pages have been converted into convenient dialog boxes too.

JIRA 5.0 incorporates a new mail handler wizard that greatly simplifies the process of configuring incoming mail handlers for creating issues or comments from email messages.

There is no longer a need to configure a JIRA service and enter a complex string of mail handler parameters to handle your email messages. Instead, simply you configure your mail handler through a convenient wizard.

Improvements have been made to the layout of JIRA's mail configuration options. The configuration options in the Mail Servers administration page have been separated into two separate pages — one for Outgoing Mail (SMTP) and another for Incoming Mail (POP/IMAP) configurations. The configuration options for mail handlers have been moved from the Services administration page and incorporated into the Incoming Mail page.

The 'view issue' page has the following enhancements:

• The Issue Links section of the 'view issue' page has been redesigned to cater for remote issue links (above) and makes better use of space — the separate line used to group issue link types in earlier versions of JIRA has been removed.
• The right-hand side of the view issue page now uses a fixed width. Hence, when the 'view page' is maximised on large, high resolution monitors, the association between field names and values is not lost.
• In JIRA versions prior to 5.0, initially clicking any tab in the Activity section would reload the whole 'view issue' page. In JIRA 5.0, the content within each of these (non-selected) tabs only loads upon being clicked by a user and does so independently of the rest of the 'view issue' page. This modified behaviour provides more rapid access to the information on these tabs.
• For plugin developers - the left hand side of the 'view issue' page can be customised via web panels. Hence, you can now insert your own custom panels anywhere below the operations bar on the 'view issue' page.
  The web panel location for the left-hand side of the 'view issue' page is atl.jira.view.issue.left.context — refer to the View Issue Page Locations page of the Web Fragments guide in our Atlassian Developers documentation site for more information. Also see our plugin tutorial for an example of customising the right-hand side of the 'view issue' page (a feature which became available in JIRA 4.4).