Upgrading Jira to latest (5.05) but keep Confluence at 3.5x - is that a good idea?

[Deleted user]

Following on from the security advisory the other day, I don't want us to move onto Confluence 4.x because of the withdrawal of wiki markup.

The question is - if we stay on the latest Confl. 3.x, should we just patch Jira 4.x as Atlassian recommend in the advisory? Or can we move on to Jira 5.x without scuppering the relationship between the wiki and Jira?

We use Jira to manage users in both Jira and Confl.

[RianA · Accepted solution]

Hi Kathleen, there might be incompatibility with Application link. User management wise, it would be okay to stay, but we strongly encourage you to upgrade, cause it will reach its End of Life policy in one year.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Mmm, I know why Kathleen isn't looking to upgrade and I mostly agree with her. I think the removal of wiki-markup needs fixing before she'll upgrade. I think you'll need to consider backwards compatibility of Confluence 3.5 and other Atlassian products until that's been addressed.

[RianA]

Hi Nick, I see, I understand about that concern. But unfortunately so far, there's no plan to put wiki markup back in action according to this. Perhaps you can give it a go with the new editor. I know it's not perfect, but we always welcome feedback :)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm well aware of it. I'm ok with the new editor, but I don't write a lot.

Many of the users are not happy with the replacement. The users here at my main site still won't pass testing on Confluence 4.x. They're happy(ish) with 3.5 and I think Atlassian need to accept that a lot of sites simply aren't going to move to Confluence 4, and hence need to keep later Jira functions compatible with it. If the Jira/Confluence-3.5 integration breaks, that's not going to be a reason to upgrade Confluence, it's going to be a reason to move to another system. At that point, the integration with the Confluence replacement becomes an issue and they start looking at dropping Jira too.

(Apologies to Kathleen, I've rambled off-topic here)

[Deleted user]

Nic, thanks for your comments. You're correct on all points.

I reluctantly accept that Atlassian refuse to consider bringing back wiki markup. But there is no way I could recommend an upgrade to 4.x until the new editor is "fit for purpose". There are currently way too many bugs in it -- 187 open issues as of today -- & that doesn't necessarily include the original 1000+ bugs in the original open-source code.

So given my reluctance to push for an "upgrade" for Confluence, and because most of our developers dislike the way Jira has been implemented on site anyway, I think the Atlassian option will just fall away to be replaced by something else.

It's a pity. I used to love Confluence.

[Deleted user]

I've accepted Rian's answer, but I don't like it. I really, really, really want Atlassian to continue support for Confluence 3.5.x indefinitely, or until they come back to their senses and at least provide an HTML editor that's available for ordinary users. For goodness sake, even *Sharepoint* has an HTML editor.

[Deleted user]

We were on JIRA 5.0.6 for about 4 months while still on Confluence 2.9.1 :) I have since upgraded our Confluence instance to the latest and greatest.

During those 4 months all functionality remained the same in terms of JIRA/Confluence linking.

This is a very large unlimited user instance with 2000+ users and we had no tickets during that 4 month period about reduced functionality

We had our detractors with regards to wiki markup as well, but all have come around to the dark side and really enjoy confluence 4.2. So far everyone has been happy with using the wiki markup macro if they really really want to continue to utilize markup.

Hope this helps.

[Harry Chan]

Hi, I don't see any loss in functionality happening. Worse case some new functionality that links Confluence and JIRA will simply not work, that's all.