Changes to accessing Teams in Jira and Confluence

[Ashwini Rattihalli]

Hello everyone 👋,

I'm Ashwini, Product Manager for the Teams app, and I’m here to share an update about how you’ll access Teams across Atlassian apps.

What’s changing?

The teams feature is being relocated from Jira and Confluence. You'll be taken to the Teams app while accessing teams via the app shortcuts in the sidebar or through the app switcher.

Why are we making this change?

This change is part of our ongoing effort to make Atlassian apps more consistent and easier to use. By centralizing Teams in its own app, we’re simplifying navigation and making it easier to find and connect with your teams, no matter which Atlassian app you’re using.

What does this mean for you?

Rest assured, this transition will not affect how your users connect Teams to your work or alter any permissions you've set up. Teams will appear in the app shortcuts for users who previously did not see it in the navigation, but their permissions to use teams will not change.

When is this happening?

The rollout has already begun and will be available to all users over the next couple of weeks.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback.

Cheers,
Ashwini

[Rune Rasmussen]

Decoupling Teams from the individual products is a good move I think.

What other things is in the pipeline for Teams?

Some things we need before we can really begin using Teams are:
Admin control over who can create new Teams - Otherwise it's just a matter of time before duplicate/wrong Teams gets created and then we'll have to keep cleaning that up.

General settings for who can manage a Team - Because Teams not linked to a group should be owned and managed by someone and not everyone.

Custom Teams fields (single and multi-picker) with the ability to scope which Teams can be selected (like we can on User picker fields). - because sometimes the Stakeholder is a team of people and not just individuals, and sometimes not every Team should be selectable.

[Josh]

I agree with @Run ; better RBAC for admins would be very helpful when it comes to Teams.

@ash one key missing piece of Teams functionality is the ability to limit a work item's assignee based on the selected team.

• For example - the Server team is selected on a work item. We'd then want to limit the Assignee list to members of the Server team rather than every possible Jira user.
• Ideally, this functionality would be configurable at the project level so some projects could have open assignments and others would be bound by team-based assignments, as needed.

If you'd ever like to discuss this use case more, I'd be happy to jump on a call.

[Ashwini Rattihalli]

Thank you for the feedback!

We’re currently planning improvements to admin controls for Teams. While we're still in the early exploration phase, we’d love to get your insights on the direction we’re heading.

@Rune Rasmussen  – For the Team custom field type, could you please also upvote this ticket?

@Josh  – That’s a great suggestion. I didn’t find any existing ticket for it. Could you please open a new one and include your use case?

I’d love to discuss your requirements and share more about the direction we’re exploring. Feel free to book time with me using this link to my schedule.

[Rune Rasmussen]

@Ashwini Rattihalli Thank you for pointing out that feature request.
I have voted for it.

I have booked a time slot with you this Friday, and forwarded it to my admin colleague as well.

[Josh]

Hi @Ashwini Rattihalli . Looking forward to the discussion next week.

Here's the JAC ticket: JSDCLOUD-16103 Assigning Issues: Provide a way to interact with Teams, such as limiting Assignees to a member of the Team on the Issue.  

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

Makes sense that it becomes an App like "Assets".    

Re: Teams.  Is there any plans for some functionality like:

• Add a Team as a watcher
• @mention a team
• Assign to a Team (via the Assignee)

Agree that we absolutely need some permissions on Teams otherwise it becomes the wild west and unusable.

Thanks,

Susan

[Ashwini Rattihalli]

1. We haven't considered that yet
2. We support @mentioning teams across our Apps. You can try this in any text field
   

3. Our current thinking is that the assignee should represent a single individual—someone who is clearly responsible for moving the work item forward. When a Team is set as the assignee, it often becomes unclear who’s actually accountable for progress. That said, I’d love to better understand your use case—could you share more about the scenario where assigning a team makes sense for you?

[Rune Rasmussen]

@Ashwini Rattihalli The @-mentioning Teams is not entirely amazing. It's quite clunky looking.

If we go by your "Magnetic IT" example it would look something like this:
Magnetic IT(@first member @second member @third member and so on...)

So if you're mentioning a large team it suddenly takes up a significant amount of space in your text.
It seems like it's not so much a true mention of the Team but more of a shortcut to individually mention all team members.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

What about adding Teams to watchers?  Or being able to notify Teams in automation?

Susan

[Josh]

@Ashwini Rattihalli - teams as watchers like @Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ mentioned would be great! +1 for that idea.

I'm with you on avoiding making teams selectable as assignees. In transitioning from a legacy ITSM system to JSM, we had a large internal change management hurdle around breaking free of that practice. We ended up creating a field called "Associated Team" that was alongside the Assignee field. That way people could "associate" a team to the work item but there would only be one clear assignee responsible for the ticket. Please don't clear the path to relitigate that concept again. 🙏

@Rune Rasmussen makes a good point about the @mentions. On the other hand, I have found it helpful to be able to manually remove some members from the list. Very internally conflicted here...

[Ashwini Rattihalli]

@Rune Rasmussen you are right, the @mentioning experience is not optimal right now. We have considered making it similar to @mentioning a person, so that you can see just the team name. 

@Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ here's a workaround for how you can notify all the team members via automation - demo. 

For the team watchers feature, it would be good to raise a JAC ticket for that. 

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

@Ashwini Rattihalli , thanks for the demo BUT really?  I saw the most complex automation for email a team? Kinda ridiculous when all we really want is the option to put "Team" in the "To" in the send email automation step.  How hard can that be?  You already handle Groups just fine?

Please continue to work on Teams to integrate it more fully into the standard Jira/automation functionality.   For the most part I don't encourage anyone to use Teams in our organization.  WHen we first migrated to cloud I thought it would be a great feature, but soon found out how entirely limiting it is and yet it's going to be it's own app?

Re Assignee to a team, I too don't really agree with that BUT if a team is added to a work item, I would just expect to have a lot of the same functionality as if it was an assignee.  Like being able to add as a watcher, set up Teams in the notification scheme, set up teams (easily) for notifications in automation, @mention in teams without it unravelling all the team members.  

Can we not get the basics working for Teams?

Thanks,

Susan

[Ashwini Rattihalli]

Thank you for your feedback!
We’re actively working on several improvements to the Teams experience that we hope will address many of the pain points you mentioned. We’re still in the early stages of some of these efforts, and I’d love to get your input on the direction we’re exploring.
If you’re open to chatting, here’s a link to schedule a meeting with me.