Jira 4.4 available today: Visual Workflow and More!
Atlassian is thrilled to announce the release of Jira 4.4 – our biggest Jira release in years satisfying over 1,400 votes!
The Jira dev team has been working hard to get time-saving and productivity features in for Jira admins and end users alike.
- Visual Workflow Designer
- Project-centric administration
- New installer & upgrader
- More power in search
Check out all the features in the What’s New video! Stay tuned here in the coming weeks for deep dives and technical details about the highlights of Jira 4.4.
Project-centric Administration
Visual Workflow Designer
Project administration has a new, simple interface. All the specifics of a project are available at-a-glance, making it easy to get a handle on an existing project – which issue types, fields, and permissions are associated – and make changes on the fly. Workflow editing is the most exciting part – Jira 4.4 includes the new built-in visual workflow designer.
New Upgrader, Installer
Upgrades, installation and setup each have a new wizard. The new upgrader:
- checks plugin compatibility
- provides a file ‘customization
report’ - migrates commonly modified files
Which means Jira will be up and production-ready in a snap, leaving tons of time to explore the project-centric admin pages. With Administration Quick Search, you can now get to any page in the administration section by just typing in the name.
More Power in JQL
Everyone using Jira will love the new search enhancements, with the ‘WAS’ operator extended to the Assignee and Reporter fields. Add in dynamic date searching – for changes made before, after, on, or during a date range – and there are dozens of new searches available to get specific information out of Jira. A few examples:
- the issues assigned to QA by Paul
assignee was in membersOf"QA" BY pslade - the issues Kyle assigned to John
assignee WAS john BY kyle - the issues Christina resolved last week
status WAS resolved BEFORE endOfWeek() by cbang - reporter was in QA group during May
reporter was in membersOf("QA") DURING ("2011/05/01","2011/05/31") - issues assigned to Ken during June
assignee was ken DURING ("2011/06/01","2011/06/30")
Heaps more to check out
User Time Zones
Setting a user time zone will display all times in your zone, and indicate if other users are currently in night or day – helping with real-time activity, decisions about who to assign an issue to, and expectations around how soon a user might respond.
Email & Streams
Email templates and Activity Streams have had a productivity makeover. Emails offer more information at a glance in HTML and on mobile, and activity streams offer a slew of new useful features:
- presents more valuable information in more easily consumable ways
- lets you filter down to just the items you care about
- lets you take action directly from the Stream
