Jira 8.5.x is going end of life on 18OCT

Oct 5, 2021 | Jira

On October 18, Jira 8.5.x is going end of life.  The newest long term support release is 8.13

Why do you want to upgrade?

Well, besides the fact that 8.5 is going end of life, there are new features and bug fixes you will want to take advantage of:

 

Some New features since 8.5 (most of these reference data center)

  • Perhaps group these in sections? UI changes, audit and security, compatibility, performance
  • Advanced Roadmaps (AKA Jira Portfolio) is available is part of your Data Center license.
  • Jira copies over changes files on upgrade
  • Reply to JIRA notifications in Outlook improved.
  • Users and roles improved
  • Prefix and suffix search
  • Accessibility improvements
  • Burnup charts in Jira software
  • Rate limiting
  • Cluster monitoring
  • Anonymizing users for GDPR compliance and other GDPR features
  • PostgreSQL 11 support
  • OpenID Connect
  • Revamped Audit log
  • Setting dates for future sprints
  • OAuth 2.0 support for incoming mail
  • Optimized custom fields with more insights
  • More control on private filters and dashboards (should we break out UI changes in their own subset?
  • More control of advanced audit logs
  • Support for MSQL 8.0
  • Less app impact on indexing.

Minor upgrades in 8.13

  • User focused
  • Admin focused

Now that you are convinced here are some tips for performing your upgrade.

 

Take advantage of the built in tools

In Administration, Plan your upgrade gives you a guide to upgrading including performing pre-upgrade checks and guiding you through the things to look out for.

But it isn’t perfect.

The little things they skip, because everyone knows to do them right?

  • Back up database
  • Making room for the install and home directory backups.

The things they just forget to mention at all