Atlassian Cloud Updates/Changes Like MS 365 Page

[Charisma Riley]

Hi, there. Microsoft has a Roadmap page for their cloud product, Microsoft 365, here, and I get the Microsoft 365 announcements newsletter which shows me all of the feature and product announcements for 365 over the past week. Additionally, this page here gives me all the update resources for 365 in one location. I am looking for a place like this for the Atlassian Confluence Cloud product; I located something similar for the Atlassian Confluence Server on-premises version here, but cannot find anything for Confluence Cloud. I'm assuming I'm just not looking in the right place. All help is appreciated!

Thanks, in advance! 

[Stephen Sifers · Accepted solution]

Hello Charisma,

Thank you for providing exact detail with references into what you’re looking for with release notes and future changes. Atlassian does not have an official roadmap that is made available. However, we do have rather details blogs which cover changes in the cloud offerings. More about these changes may be found at the following references:

• Atlassian Cloud Documentation blog posts
• Tracking Changes in Cloud Updates  
• New features
• Atlassian Support Offerings

These references should allow you to see what has been deployed within a date along with an ability to search for items within future releases.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers

[Charisma Riley]

That's fantastic! Is there anything like the Confluence Server on-premises' End of Support page for Confluence Cloud? Or is this something that you guys can note would be of extreme interest to your users; since you make it for one, how hard is it to make it for both? Also, a place to find out actual timelines of when things are due to roll out is a necessity.

[Stephen Sifers]

Hello Charisma,

Glad you found the documents useful.

For Confluence cloud and an end of support article, there won’t be anything that directly translates to this as there are no user responsible platforms required for supporting Confluence cloud. What does this mean? Confluence cloud does not require users to manage and ensure their environment for the product are updated and supported.

To see which items are being deprecated within Confluence cloud, you would need to review Functional differences in Confluence Cloud which covers deprecated items at the bottom of the document. This will also display new features being delivered.

There is no set timeline for when features are rolled out globally due to how they may act or react while being deployed which may include regressions or reported bugs that may cause delays during testing and deployment. However, you could look with Jira.Atlassian.Com for features and bugs that are selected for release. You may find those at Confluence Cloud Awaiting Release.

I hope this proves helpful and answers your questions around new features, what's released and when.

Regards,
Stephen Sifers

[Charisma Riley]

@Stephen Sifers , this definitely helps. My concern about an end of support page for Cloud is this: the changes, regardless of whether cloud customers are responsible for them or required to take any part in maintaining their Confluence instance, these changes impact the users on the other end. Therefore, the whole thing is just as relevant. Also, people like to stay in the know, and having a single location where they can find of the information you've told me about in what, 6 different sources now? This methodology is not convenient or easy-to-obtain. Microsoft keeps it in one place for cloud and on-premises applications. They understand that *all* of their users are still impacted by the changes they make  and that cloud customers are no exception. IBM has a "software lifecycle" search center where you can find anything related to your products, including cloud. HP Enterprise allows me to sign up for all product updates, including all cloud solutions, much like Microsoft's alert system, that are delivered to my email; they also allow me to search all HPE solutions for specific cloud end of support, lifecycle, and roadmaps. This is a thing. Even cloud customers want to be in the know. Deprecations affect future pursuits, for example. The fact that people don't even know when to expect changes is upsetting. Keeping people in the know, whether you guys find it unnecessary or not, is irrelevant; your average customer *does* care about knowing what's coming, going, and when. Even Netflix and Hulu manage to share this information. They could technically just roll out whatever programming they want, when they want and not care whether people know about it in advance or not; but people like to know. So they release all of the programming changes and the exact scheduled dates of each rollout, every month. I cannot express how worrisome it can be to feel like just because you have "cloud" customers, that they don't care about what you do to their installation. For what it's worth, transparency is someone's working infrastructure, cloud or on-prem, is everything.