Emphasizing Forge’s Rise, Strengthening Enterprise Cloud, and Shaping the Data Center
The past four weeks have been a time of intense and strategically important activity across the Atlassian ecosystem. The wave of updates, from developer platform improvements to major version previews, shows a clear and coordinated focus on three core strategic pillars: the rapid growth of the Forge development platform, the maturing of Cloud products for enterprises, and the careful evolution of the Data Center line.
This post outlines the key changes from mid-June to mid-July 2025, providing a detailed overview for developers and administrators. The developments are not isolated features but interconnected actions that indicate Atlassian’s future direction.
Atlassian Platform & Cloud Updates
The main focus for Atlassian Cloud is on empowering developers through the Forge platform while also developing the commercial and administrative infrastructure needed by large enterprise customers.
Jira
Jira Cloud is being enhanced not just to support more users, but also to deliver the powerful functional and commercial features that large-scale customers expect.
- Changing terminology: Jira is going from “projects” to “spaces” starting October 2025. This aims to make the language more intuitive and consistent with Atlassian tools, such as Confluence. The core functionality remains unchanged; it’s a renaming to better reflect their use by teams for ongoing work. (Atlassian Community Article)
- CLI for automation: The Atlassian Command-Line Interface (ACLI) for Jira now supports all Jira Cloud plans, allowing administrators to manage Jira via text commands in their terminal. It offers a faster, efficient alternative to the UI, simplifies scripting by handling authentication, performance, and errors, and is designed for speed with support for complex, high-volume tasks. Install the appropriate package for your OS to begin. (Atlassian Community Article)
- User interface changes: The “Status” field for work items will be moved under the summary to make status updates easier and more frequent, thereby improving onboarding. Starting in mid-August, it will first be applied to team-managed projects, and then expanded to company-managed ones. The “Resolution” field remains unchanged. (Atlassian Community Article)
- Simplified Plan settings: Jira’s new ‘Plan Settings’ provides a streamlined experience with customizable advanced features like scenarios, auto-scheduler, and releases. The menu is simplified, and pages are consolidated into organized tabs. (Atlassian Community Article)
- Enterprise Scale: The user limit for Jira Cloud increased from 50,000 to 100,000 users, challenging large enterprise deployments previously limited to Data Center. New Marketplace app pricing tiers now support up to 100,000 users, allowing the ecosystem to scale with the platform.
- Enhanced Data Handling: A new capability for number field formatting, including currency and percentage types, is being progressively rolled out for team-managed projects via the Atlassian GraphQL Gateway (AGG). This addresses a key requirement for business and finance teams, and its delivery via GraphQL first signals a modern, API-centric approach to new feature development.
- API Modernization: In a move to improve performance at scale, usage information has been removed from the responses of several workflow and status APIs as of July 7, 2025, with developers now directed to use dedicated usage APIs. Additionally, legacy JQL search endpoints were removed on June 30, 2025, completing a long-planned migration to more secure and performant search APIs. These changes are not just housekeeping; they are foundational engineering efforts necessary to support the stability and performance of 100,000-user instances.
- Workflow Consistency: When updating workflows via the API, any associated draft workflows are now automatically discarded. This aligns the API’s behavior with the new workflow editor, which has now reached complete functionality and no longer uses the old draft model, thereby preventing data inconsistencies.
- Improved Bulk Operations: The Bulk Move API has been enhanced to allow for moving parent and child work items together in a single request, streamlining large-scale issue reorganization.
Confluence
Confluence Cloud is evolving from a collaborative documentation tool into a dynamic, structured content hub, creating opportunities for a new class of powerful applications.
- Collaborate! Confluence improved its live collaboration by updating telepointers, the cursors showing other users in a document. Now, cursors are de-duplicated so each person appears once, even with multiple tabs open. Hover over a cursor to see the full name, and click an avatar to jump to their location, making it easier to identify who is editing and where. (Atlassian Community Article.
- Personal work podcast: Listen to audio briefings of Confluence content. (Confluence Support)
- Telepointers: Confluence has improved live collaboration by updating telepointers (collaborators’ cursors). Cursors are now de-duplicated, so each person appears once, even with multiple tabs. Hover over a cursor to see the full name, and click their avatar to jump to their location in the document, making it easier to see who is editing and where. (Atlassian Community Article)
- Goodbye: The Legacy Editor is being deprecated in Confluence Cloud. (Atlassian Community Article)
- Structured & Searchable Data: Developers can now define content property indexing directly in the Forge manifest. This allows structured JSON data stored within a Confluence page to be indexed and queried via CQL. This effectively transforms Confluence from a repository of unstructured text into a queryable, content-addressable database, paving the way for sophisticated knowledge management and reporting apps.
- Real-Time Event Triggers: A comprehensive set of new product events has been added, allowing Forge apps to react in real-time to granular changes like a page being trashed, permissions being updated, or custom content being modified. The combination of structured data and real-time triggers positions Confluence as a viable application backend for a new generation of content-centric Forge apps.
- Forge UI Integration: A new Confluence Page Banner module is now generally available for Forge, providing developers with a sanctioned, highly visible location to display contextual information on pages.
Forge & Developer Platform
Atlassian is deliberately prioritizing its Forge platform, creating a more secure and integrated ecosystem while systematically managing the transition from the legacy Connect framework.
- Exclusive UI Real Estate: Atlassian is developing exclusive Forge integration points, available only to Forge apps. An Early Access Program (EAP) now supports a Forge module for the new Atlassian Home Dashboards—prime UI space. Also, full Forge custom field support is now available on Jira Service Management portal, a key customer interface. This “real estate” strategy incentivizes developers to adopt Forge by offering capabilities that the older Connect framework can’t match.
- Accelerated Connect-to-Forge Migration: Starting August 18, 2025, minor updates will automatically switch apps from Connect to Forge, shifting from an “opt-in” to “opt-out’ model. This significantly speeds up Forge adoption across the Marketplace.
- App-to-App Interoperability: A preview of “App events” lets Forge apps publish and subscribe to events from other apps, enabling sophisticated, multi-app solutions to collaborate on complex business problems.
- Platform Enhancements: Transactions for Key-Value Store (KVS) and Custom Entity Store are now generally available, enabling atomic multi-operation database actions. The Forge UI Kit Icon component has been refreshed with new glyphs and updated properties as part of a visual refresh, with breaking changes scheduled for January 1, 2026.
Atlassian Administration & Security
Major updates to the administrative layer focus on improving governance, security, and usability for large, complex organizations.
- Premium Security Packaging: The threat detection feature “Beacon (beta)” is being officially replaced by “Guard Detect” and included in the Atlassian Guard Premium subscription. This simplifies Atlassian’s premium security options into a clearer value for enterprise buyers.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Data security policies in Atlassian Guard now block downloading files attached to Jira and Confluence issues, crucial for preventing data exfiltration and meeting compliance.
- Admin Usability: Various enhancements have been implemented to improve the management of large user bases, such as improved filtering on the user list, a unified “User requests” page for access control, and more streamlined user profile layouts.
Data Center Updates
Cloud stays the main focus of innovation, while Atlassian strategically improves its self-hosted Data Center products by enhancing current versions’ performance and hinting at a major, potentially disruptive platform update.
Confluence Data Center
- Stability and Performance: Confluence 9.5.2 was released on July 1, 2025, with bug fixes and stability improvements. The previous Confluence 9.5 introduced a “Controlled search reindex” feature, enabling admins to reindex specific site parts, such as content or attachments, instead of full-site reindexing. This reduces maintenance and improves system availability.
- Upcoming Major Version: A beta for Confluence 10.0 is now available for testing. This next major version is expected to include significant underlying framework upgrades, requiring app developers to begin compatibility testing immediately.
Jira & JSM Data Center
- Upcoming Major Version: The third Early Access Program (EAP) build for Jira Software 11.0 and Jira Service Management 11.0 was released on July 17, 2025. Like Confluence 10.0, this release signals a major platform shift. Documentation indicates that upcoming major versions of Data Center products will include substantial changes like Spring and Jakarta framework upgrades and the removal of deprecated components, which will cause breaking changes for nearly every app in the Marketplace. This will necessitate a significant, mandatory refactoring effort from all Data Center app developers.
Bitbucket & Crowd Data Center
- Stability Releases: Bitbucket Data Center and Server received bug fix releases with versions 8.19.20 and 9.4.8.
- Upcoming Major Version: An EAP for Crowd 7.0 is now available for testing, aligning with the major upgrade cycle of the other Data Center products.
