Full Integration with LDAP and Active Directory

The way users and groups are stored and accessed in JIRA has been totally rewritten in this release, giving you the ability to connect to an LDAP server — including Microsoft Active Directory — for all user information. Your options include:

Integrate JIRA with LDAP/Active Directory

Update your user details in either JIRA or LDAP/Active Directory and they will automatically populate to the other repository:

Use LDAP for authentication only

This was the old way of integrating JIRA with LDAP, prior to JIRA 4.3. You can still do this, but much more easily (see below).

Connect to a Crowd server for user management

For larger and more complex installations, you may need to install Atlassian Crowd for user management and single sign-on. (See our guide to limitations and recommendations.) When integrating earlier versions of JIRA and Crowd, you had to manually edit a number of configuration files. JIRA 4.3 offers the following new features:

• Simple and quick setup via the JIRA and Crowd administration consoles.
• Clever synchronisation and caching to ensure the best response times.
• More...

Use multiple LDAP and/or Crowd servers simultaneously

If you have multiple directories, you can now simply connect JIRA to all of them.

Connect Confluence to your JIRA User Directory

JIRA 4.3 can act as the directory manager for your Confluence site, interacting with one or more user directories and ensuring that you have the same set of users and groups across both applications.

The Confluence 3.5 administration UI can connect directly to JIRA 4.3. Clever synchronisation and caching ensure the best response times for your directory searches.

Earlier versions of Confluence can continue to use a direct JDBC connection to JIRA 4.2 and earlier.

Easy Management of User Directories via JIRA Admin UI

In JIRA 4.3, administrators can now manage external User Directories directly from the JIRA Administration screens. Gone are the days of manually editing XML files.

JIRA 4.3 brings a simple, powerful and flexible directory management interface:

• Choose from a list of supported directory types, including Microsoft Active Directory and ten other popular LDAP schemas.
• Configure all your LDAP settings via the JIRA Administration interface: permissions, server and schema settings. We pre-populate the fields with default values depending on your choice of directory type.
• Choose the LDAP permissions to suit your needs: read/write, read only, local groups or authentication only.
• Make use of the caching and copy-as-required configurations to optimise the performance of your LDAP searches.
• Add as many directory servers as you need. Connect directory servers of different types, including the JIRA internal directory (default), LDAP, Crowd and/or another JIRA server.
• Turn on support for nested groups.
• Configure your LDAP connection pool.

New Plugin Management System

JIRA 4.3 includes the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM), which provides you with a simple way of adding and managing plugins:

• Auto-discovery of available plugins (see Featured Plugins in the screenshot below)
• Point-and-click installation — you no longer need to download JAR files and shut down JIRA to install them.

See Managing JIRA's Plugins.

Add Another Application's Gadgets to your JIRA Gadget Directory

JIRA 4.3 includes Atlassian Gadgets 2.0 with Gadget Subscriptions. This allows you to quickly add all gadgets from your Confluence, Bamboo, FishEye or Crucible instance — or from another JIRA instance — to your JIRA Gadget Directory, for easy addition to your JIRA dashboard:

See Subscribing to Another Application's Gadgets.

Improved Importer

JIRA 4.3 provides a greatly improved Importer for Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz and CSV files, by bundling the JIRA Importers Plugin.

The web-based import wizard makes it easy to map fields — and individual field values — from your old bug-tracker to your new JIRA system:

Dashboard Performance Improvements

We are extremely pleased to announce that you should see a noticeable reduction in the time it takes to load a Dashboard.

• On average, dashboard performance has improved by 29%
• For large dashboards, the performance improvement is 35%

We are also extremely pleased to announce that you should see a noticeable reduction in the time it takes to load the Gadget Directory (depending on how many external gadgets you have configured).

JIRA Now Supports 'In-place Database Upgrades'

JIRA 4.3 now officially supports 'in-place database upgrades', when upgrading from JIRA 4.0.0 or later.

This method requires much less downtime during the JIRA upgrade process, especially if you operate a large JIRA installation. You no longer need to export your existing JIRA data to an XML backup and then restore this data into your new JIRA version. Instead, we now support simply 'pointing' your new version of JIRA at your existing JIRA database!

See the documentation for more details.

Search for Issue Changes, Relative Dates and Relative Versions with JQL

JIRA 4.3 incorporates new several functions and operators. You can now:

Search the Change History with JQL 'WAS' Operator

JIRA 4.3 introduces the ability to search the Change History of issues. In this release you can search for changes to the Status field, and there's much more functionality to come in future releases.

For example, the following will return all issues that currently have, or previously had, a status of 'In Progress':

The WAS operator can be used with the NOT, IN and NOT IN operators, e.g. to find issues that have never had a status of 'In Progress' or 'Resolved':

Search for relative dates and versions with JQL 'startOfDay', 'endOfDay', 'earliestUnreleasedVersion', 'latestReleasedVersion'

JIRA 4.3 introduces the ability to search for issues relative to the current day, month, week or year. For example, to find issues that have been created today:

Or to find issues that are due by the end of this month:

You can also perform searches based on the earliest unreleased version (i.e. the next version that is due to be released) of a specified project:

Or on the most recently released version of a specified project:

Quick Search Enhancements

JIRA 4.3 incorporates several enhancements to Quick Search. You can now:

Use a wild card when searching the 'Fix Version' field with Quick Search

When using Quick Search, you can now use the wildcard symbol: "*" to find issues that matches a core part of a Fix Version. For example, "ff:3.2*" will match any issue whose Fix For Version is:

• 3.2
• 3.2-beta
• 3.2.1
• 3.2.x

Use the r: prefix with Quick Search to find issues reported by a specific user

With Quick Search, you can find issues reported by you, another user or with no reporter, using the prefix "r:" followed by a specific reporter term such as "me", a username or "none", such that:

• "r:me" — finds issues reported by you.
• "r:samuel" — finds issues reported by the user whose username is "samuel".
• "r:none" — finds issues with no reporter

Revamped User Avatars

JIRA 4.3 introduces the new-look Atlassian avatars:

• User avatars are displayed as the icon for your profile, and to illustrate your comments on an issue. See the documentation on Adding a User Avatar.

We were fond of the old avatars, but think you'll agree they were looking a little dated by comparison:

Improvements to Issue Links

The 'Linked Issues' section of the 'View Issue' screen has been streamlined to make it both more compact and quicker to use. You can now delete links directly from this screen upon mouse hover:

JIRA 4.3: a linked issue

Previously, to delete a link you needed to click the 'cog' icon (which took you to a separate screen):

JIRA 4.2: a linked issue

Remembered Assignees

JIRA now makes it easier to assign users to issues. The top of the assignee dropdown list shows the last five people you assigned issues to, as well as the reporter of the issue and all participants involved in the issue.

Mail Server Configuration Improvements

In JIRA 4.3, administrators can now test their mail server configuration with the "Test Connection" button.

A "Timeout" field has also been added.

Security Enhancements

For enhanced security:

'Whitelist' for External URLs

For security reasons, an administrator may wish to limit the URLs from which users can source content that is displayed on their JIRA site (e.g. via an External Gadget).

JIRA 4.3 allows you to create a 'Whitelist' of URLs — or URL patterns — whose content you wish to make available to users of your JIRA site:

See the documentation for more details.

User Email Change is now Password Protected

Users will now be prompted to enter their password when changing their email address.

JIRA provides Secure Administration Sessions

Access to JIRA's administration features and functions is now password-protected.

See the documentation for more details.

Support Tools Plugin Now Bundled

We are very pleased to announce that the Atlassian Support Tools Plugin is now bundled with JIRA. The Atlassian Support Tools Plugin provides tools to help you troubleshoot issues with Atlassian products and get help from Atlassian Support.

See the documentation for more details.

Application Links: Connecting Applications Together

JIRA 4.3 includes Application Links, which makes it easy to connect your Atlassian applications together.

Application Links allows you to link your JIRA, Confluence, FishEye, Crucible, Bamboo and Subversion applications.

Linking two applications allows you to share information and access one application's functions from within the other. For example, if you linked a Confluence server to a JIRA server, you can create, find and insert JIRA issues directly onto a Confluence page or blog post using the new 'Insert JIRA Issue' option in Confluence 3.5.

You can even choose to associate your JIRA project with the 'entities' of other Atlassian applications (i.e. Confluence spaces, FishEye repositories or projects, Crucible projects, Bamboo projects, or other JIRA projects). The 'Configure Application Links' option on your JIRA project configuration screen, allows you to easily associate your JIRA project with these entities.

Applications Links is bundled with JIRA 4.3, Confluence 3.5 and FishEye 2.4.

See the documentation for more details.

Support for Chrome and Safari 5 Browsers

We are very pleased to announce that Chrome and Safari 5 are supported for use with JIRA 4.3.

REST API Improvements

We have improved discoverability of issues and projects through the REST API: there is now a search resource, which can be used to search for issues using JIRA Query Language (JQL). It is also possible to obtain a list of projects in a JIRA instance. Have a look at the reference documentation to see if the REST API offers the features that you want (let us know if not).

Clients that log in through the REST API can now determine when the login has been denied due to a CAPTCHA requirement: the HTTP header X-Authentication-Denied-Reason has all the necessary information.