Jira Service Desk 4.4.x release notes

9 September 2019

We're excited to present Jira Service Desk 4.4.

Highlights

• More control over SLA calendars
• Issue archiving in Jira Service Desk Data Center
• Browse permission works as expected
• Filters in 'Multi user picker' custom field
• Better email notifications
• External links open in a new tab
• Filters to browse archived issues
• Jira becomes more accessible
• Jira in Docker
• New supported databases
• Resolved issues
• Get ready to upgrade

Get the latest version

More

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:

• Jira Software 8.4 release notes

Sneak peek into Jira's roadmap

If you want to know when our next Enterprise release is coming, check out this Community post. 

JIRA SERVICE DESK

More control over SLA calendars  

Jira Service Desk lets you create calendars that match the working hours of your team. You can link those calendars to SLAs, which means the clock stops ticking when your team is away. We recently made some huge improvements to calendars that we know you’ll love:

Calendars have a new home

If you've been updating your teams’ calendars, you probably found this process a bit inefficient. We’ve given calendars their own page so it’s easier to see which are already set up, how they're being used, and create new ones when you need them.

Make every minute count

We know that not all teams work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, so we’ve given you a quick way to track the time that counts. You can exclude lunch breaks, and add shifts through the simple click of a ‘+’. We even show the total time you’ve tracked each day and tell you if any hours are overlapping.

More flexibility for holidays

We've made importing holidays a breeze. Now, you can upload an ICS file with local and national holidays for five, or even ten, years in advance. Be sure to set your ICS file to UTC/GMT+10 before importing, and we'll sort the rest.

It's not just importing that's easier. You'll find that the new design lets you clearly see which holidays are recurring, as well as scan through past and future holidays to plan your team's capacity like a boss!

Head to Create and edit SLA calendars for more information.

Issue archiving in Jira Service Desk Data Center 

In Jira Software Data Center 8.1, we announced that you could archive and restore individual issues, export the list of archived issues, and archive up to a thousand issues at once. By default, Jira Service Desk 4.1 inherited all of these capabilities too.

In Jira Service Desk Data Center 4.4, we’ve turned our attention to the help seeker experience of issue archiving. Now, when a customer views an archived issue through a direct link, we’ll tell them its status and to raise a request if they want it restored. Learn more at Archiving an issue.

We're not done there! You can create an automation rule that lets you archive an issue when a certain trigger takes place. For example, when an issue's status changes to Done, automatically archive it to clean up your service desk.

Learn more at Automating your service project.

Browse permission works as expected

We've updated the code to make sure that we make the right permission checks for user actions and have squashed a lot of Jira bugs in the process.

Now, anyone with browse permission is considered a Jira Service Desk customer and can do the following:

• view requests they previously created
• view requests they're a request participant of
• receive request notifications
• approve requests.

Sometimes it's the small improvements that have the biggest impact on your working day.

JIRA UNIVERSE

Filters in 'Multi user picker' custom field

In response to user requests, we've made it possible to limit the multi user picker custom field to hold only a specific set of users. This prevents you from sending notifications to random users as a result of mistyping user names, and adds to the overall security of issues.

For more on the issue, see JRASERVER-36833.

Better email notifications

Back in Jira 8.0, we introduced batched email notifications that group those small events occurring close together into summary emails, to give your mailbox some breathing space. Now, after adding some improvements and letting you choose the frequency of summary emails, we’re making these notifications default, for everybody. Learn more at Configuring email notifications.

Batched notifications will bring some changes for users who have customized how their notifications look. If that's you, read all about it in our upgrade notes.

How does this impact Jira Service Desk customer notifications?

Emails that customers receive notifying them of activity on their request are not impacted by Jira email batching, and will still be sent approximately every minute. 

External links open in a new tab

You no longer need to right-click every time you want an external link (added to a Jira issue) to open in a new tab in your browser. We've made this option default for external links. However, if you like all links to open in the same tab, you can easily change this in <YourUserProfile> > Profile > Preferences > External links.

Filters to browse archived issues

When you open your list of archived issues in Issues > Archived issues, you can browse archived issues using a selection of filters and quickly find the issues you need. You can filter your issues by, for example, Reporter, Archive date, or Archiver. You can also easily export all or selected issues from the Archived issues page.

To browse all archived issues, you need the Browse Archive global permission. You can also have the Browse Project Archive permission to browse archived issues that belong to a specific project.

Additionally, you can easily export archived issues to a CSV file. For more information, see  Archiving an issue .

Jira becomes more accessible

To improve accessibility in Jira and respond to the needs of our motor and visually-impaired users, we've fixed color contrast in buttons and messages, added labels for UI elements to be picked up by screen readers, and made sure you can add comments with a keyboard shortcut.

Additionally, since we've upgraded AUI version 8.4, we've improved the readability of form fields, changed form or focus styles, and changed lozenge colors. Let's take a look...

Jira 8.3 lozenges and prior

Jira 8.4 lozenges

Jira in Docker

We’ve created official templates for deploying Jira Server and Data Center in a Docker container, joining the ranks of other Atlassian applications, like Confluence, Bamboo, and Bitbucket.

Quickly spin up a Jira instance with our template, or customize a Docker deployment on your own. The templates are available for Jira 8.0 and later. Check them out at Docker Hub.

New supported databases

We’re welcoming new databases to our family—Oracle 18c and 19c. Additionally, we’re adding support for Aurora PostgreSQL for Jira Data Center. Read the upgrade notes to learn more. 

Resolved issues

Get ready to upgrade

Before you upgrade, check out the upgrade notes for important changes in this release, then follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your site.