CLOSED: JSM June ask me anything (AMA)

[Cara Fangman]

Thanks for doing this team! Do you plan on adding auto assign functionality (based on agent's schedules) to auto assign incoming tickets? We find we must make automations on automations to accomplish this currently.

[Patricia Francezi]

Good one. 

With Opsgenie Routing calls, if integrated would address a lot of customers with!

[Liron]

Hi there,

This is on our radar to look at later this financial year but we do not have a concrete plan laid out in terms of timing and exact design yet.

[J.Acosta]

I share the opinion of Patricia Francezi and I add a complement;

1. Do you have any plans to have "team assignment" instead of person assign?
2. Do you have any plans to have "team queues" with permissions related to permit or not the view of this queue for different teams?
3. And any plans to have escalation based in teams and SLO mapped, monitored and with possible reporting?
4. Any plans to refresh the out-of-box reports for ITSM related to Service Categories? 
5. Do you have plans to implement security in the "Custom Fields"

[Patricia Francezi]

5 is also in question so many times, and many different ways... but I think its not that easy to implement.... 

[Jason D'Cruz]

Hi @J_Acosta and @Patricia Francezi ,

Could you share more context on your use cases for security in custom fields?

I can share that we are doing a lot of work behind the scenes to make custom fields easier to work with in general. This work is in progress.

We are also reviewing issue security and looking to make that a more user-friendly feature but don't have a timeline for that as of yet.

[Patricia Francezi]

Jason, 

Customer expects that they are able to "hide fields" based on "agent permissions". 

Like "behaviours" provided by script runner for example, BUT, OOB and with user interface for that. 

Think if Screens had an permission related..... etc.

[J.Acosta]

We would like to have the possibility to add "Custom Fields" and to be able to configure the security based on Groups / Roles so that this field is confidential even for the Agents of the project.

[Matthew Tutcher]

Hi Emily & team,

I'm interested in knowing some more about certification:

• How well received have the Jira certifications been thus far?
• Any new certs on the roadmap?
• Any discounts for the wider Jira community? (Cheeky ask!)

Thanks, keep up the solid development!

[Emily Dang]

Hi @Matthew Tutcher, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA. We’ll have 2 new Atlassian Certifications launching in July and August. The first is Managing Jira Projects for Data Center. There are no discounts for Community members, but Managing Jira Projects will come as a bundle with the related course, and costs only USD $100.

[Dylan Keyer]

Hello,

Is there any plan to increase the max limit on the number of fields that a single JSM Project can have? We have recently hit the limit in one of our mature Projects and it is a major nuisance to have to stand up additional Projects and break-out Request Types due to this limit.

Thanks!

[Derek White]

In the meantime, have you looked into some of the Table custom fields? These are very handy for using a single field to store LOTS of key-value pairs. Might not apply to your use-case, but worth a look.

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Dylan Keyer ,

Thanks for your question, a very good one. Am I right in assuming this is a Team-Managed service desk (Next Gen) project? 

 If that is the case, it is not currently possible to add more fields per project but I can certainly look at how we might increase that limit. I definitely agree that it is a pain point. 

If it is a Company-Managed (Classic) project, then I'd like to know how many fields we are talking about because I'd imagine it would be several hundred if not more.

Let me know, keen to understand this correctly, very much able to bring this into prioritisation conversations, although I obviously can't make any commitment at this point. 

Best regards,

Jehan

[Nour]

Hello and thank you for this open session for questions,

In fact I have question about the security and the vulnerability of Jira confluence as software. Did you fixed the security problems raised recently? 

As a customer I am worry about the use of the sensitive information to be stolen or to be used in wrong way by hackers.

I have read some articles about that that's why I am asking for more info about it.

[Derek White]

As far as I know, this page (https://www.atlassian.com/trust/security/advisories) lists all publicly disclosed issues.

The last one for Confluence was Dec 2019. Might want to provide a bit more detail/specifics, otherwise this is a pretty vague question that will be difficult for them to answer in a meaningful way.

[Emily Dang]

Hi Nour, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA! The link Derek mentioned above is the best place to see the latest publicly disclosed issues. Our team also address the vulnerabilities reported by Check Point Research here, https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trust-Security/Vulnerabilities-Reported-by-Check-Point-Research/m-p/1734060#M405. Let me know if this addresses your question. Thanks!

[Andréia Gonçalves]

Hi, Team
When will have Canned Responses in Cloud?

Thanks!

[Emily Dang]

Hi Andréia, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA! This is still something we are actively scoping out right now and we do intend to work on it in the next few quarters. Please continue to check our public facing roadmap so you can follow along with new feature releases.

[Andréia Gonçalves]

Hi, Emily. Thanks for your answer!

[Salman Ayyaz Khan]

how can we on Jira cloud after making a custom field through connect app has the field do some sort of calculation like custom filed divide by story points and display the answer in a new field?

[Derek White]

You might be better served by asking this in the Developer community: https://community.developer.atlassian.com/

[Justin Boykin]

How are you handling approvals on tickets? We have a workflow where a request may require manager approval and we'd like that to be documented in the ticket comments. In this case a manager is not a JSM agent but a member of internal teams. 

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hey @Justin Boykin ,

Approvals is a standard feature in JSM.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-approvals/

You can configure a (or multiple) statusses with an approval step. On that configuration you can specific what field the approvers need to be read from and how many approvals are required for it to move on. (you can also specify what needs to happen when you decline).

This is not documented through the comments directly but the approvals will be shown on the ticket itself (in what step and by who)

The manager does not need to have any license assigned to them, they can simply be a customer and approve through the portal.  (so they will need to added as a customer, but that's a best practice for all internal people if you are an internal service desk)

How that manager is set however is the tricky part, you can automate it if you have the source for that or someone can manually select the person who needs to approve.

[J.Acosta]

The approval must have access to the "Jira Service Management Portal" 

On the project Setting -> People 
Make sure the group has the role of "Customer" 

they don't required a Jira licence to approve request in Jira Service Management 

[Joshua Mathews]

How I handle approvals:
Generally I just let the submitter choose the appropriate manager. Most people choose an appropriate approver. Those that don't we either set a valid approver (if we know) or we kick it back to the user to try again (if we don't know).  

If there are a small/fixed number of approvers then a dropdown is awesome but usually it's just a people picker. 

The approvers go to the Portal and click Requests in the top right to see what's pending (or approve from their email alert).  As Dirk said, none of these approvers have a JSM license. 

[Joshua Mathews]

Are enhancements for Multi-sort or KB on the roadmap? Loving JSM but missing a few things from previous service desks.

• Is multi-sort on the way? I monitor the workload of a number of people and its very effective to group by Agent (or sort) and then sort by Priority and Created.  
  
  
• The KB would be (much) more effective if I could weight the articles. I miss this control from previous service desk. Would also be good to be able to see user's search terms so I can tweak labels or create articles that don't exist.  

[Emily Dang]

Hi @Joshua Mathewsthank you for your feedback! We are exploring the knowledge base features you mentioned and have a number of KB enhancements on the Jira Service Management roadmap. Please check this public roadmap for the most up to date timeline.

[Anthony Martin]

Hi JSM team,

My feeling is that the last year or two of changes (maybe more) has been geared at fancy new features with less focus on improving existing functionality, to the extent that in my view quite a huge list of core functionality remains incomplete.  I'm not going to single out any individual points here - I am referring to the very broad strategy of adding dozens of bells and whistles while there are dozens if not hundreds of essential functionalities that have been waiting on "gathering interest" etc. sometimes for years.

I understand the reasons for the features-first approach (sales) but may I ask - is there any intent on taking a step back and solidifying the core system for some period of time?  Is my concern above something you've seen/heard a lot of, and if so, could you put our minds at ease in any way?

Don't mean to be a meanie, I really do love Jira quite a lot (and am warming up to JSM), but I really want to be more comfortable if we're really going to make this a part of a medium-sized business.  Thanks for any information you're able to share.

Kind regards,

Anthony

[Derek White]

I agree. I too often look for a feature that my client expects to be there and find a ticket from 2013...

Why do you need to gather interest on basic features? I swear, Atlassian would gather interest to see if a seat was wanted in a car.

[Emily Dang]

Hi Anthony - thank you for taking the time to participate in our AMA. Our team definitely hears you and this is something we’re committing to addressing in our new fiscal year, which starts in July. We will have a team dedicated to the core Jira Service Management experience and they will be focused smoothing out the interface and releasing some of those essential functionalities that I’m sure you are referring to. We also spun up an email team to focus on some long standing email issues as well. Please continue to check our public facing roadmap so you can follow along with new feature releases. Let us know if there is anything in particular you are looking for. Thank you so much for your feedback!

[Kalin U]

Hi, JSM team.

Here are my JSM cloud-related questions:

1. Can JSM customers submit an email address in the service request form and then that email address become a customer and be added to the portal automatically?
Case in point: customer A raises a ticket and fills in an email address; this belongs to a new team-mate of hers (user B) who doesn't have a Jira account yet; when the ticket is submitted, B's email address is used to create a "customer B" and customer B is added to the respective service desk. Customer B is then even added as a request participant (but that's an extra step).

2. Can customers directly reply to JSM email notifications, thus avoid opening the service desk and commenting under the related issue?

3. Is it possible that a single company have 2 Jira instances at the same?
Case in point: company A already has its Jira instance at companyA.atlassian.net; it now wants to have a second instance at companyA2.atlassian.net allowing users from the first instance to access the second instance too.

4. Can SSO be utilized on two or more different Jira instances?
Case in point: company A and company B have their own Jira instances: companyA.atlassian.net and companyB.atlassian.net. We want to allow a certain set of users from company A to access company B's Jira instance without having to sign up with company B's Jira instance, but use their existing AD accounts.

Looking forward to your suggestions. Kudos for the AMA initiative.

[Emily Dang]

Hi Kalin, 

Thank you for participating in the JSM AMA! Here are @Jason D'Cruz's responses to your questions.

1. It is possible for JSM customers to submit an email address in the service request form and then that email address become a customer and be added to the portal automatically? Please see this post for more details on how to get this to work. One thing to note is that you must have the correct Customer Permissions settings enabled for customers to add new customers.

2. Customers can directly reply to JSM email notifications and communicate solely by email based on project settings.

3. Yes that is possible, with the organization concept you are able to have your Company create multiple instances and control who gets access to what. On top of that if you are looking for run Jira across your organisation you can check out our enterprise tier - which gives you a licensing model where you only pay for user once in your organisation and they can have access to as many instance as you create in your organisation.

4. This should be achievable with Atlassian Access along with the organisation setup mentioned above.

[Kalin U]

Thanks, @Emily Dang and Jason for the prompt responses.

Can you elaborate a bit further on "This should be achievable with Atlassian Access along with the organisation setup mentioned above." How can I set up SSO for multiple instances within the same organization if they use different ADs?

[Arnt Witteveen]

Hi, what's the latest on migrating Insight databases? Not only do we have the content, there is a lot of value for our users in the change history of these objects as well.

[Emily Dang]

Hi @Arnt Witteveen, thank you for participating in the JSM AMA! For Insight Cloud app database to Insight for JSM Cloud, export/import functionality to get databases from the app into the integrated version will be available by the end of summer.

For Insight Server/DC to Insight for JSM Cloud, we are working on it but it will be further out in the future. One of the things we need to look at, especially for server, is if and how we can preserve that history.

[Cornelius Maximen]

Hi Apologies if this question has already been posted, but when will we have the ability to override the domain escpecially for the customer portal this is soo important to us. Right now we have two ITSM projects and its very confusing to our customers as the helpdesk URL doesn't bear any resemblance to the services.

This should be a priority we had this functionality on Zoho and JIRA to me is a far superior product but lacking in this respect.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hi @Cornelius Maximen ,

that is something that’s being worked on. You can see more details here. 

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

[Emily Dang]

Hi @Cornelius Maximen, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA. Thank you for the quick response, @Dirk Ronsmans! 

This was scoped for the original custom domain work which not only allows the ability to override portal domain, but also to set a custom domain on your Atlassian site. However, there was a critical security problem and there is currently a team working out a solution while ensuring our cloud security standard is met. For more information and to keep up to date with the team’s progress, please follow the suggestion ticket Dirk linked above. 

[A.J. Apple]

My team might use JSM to manage developer requests, but sometimes we'll want their ticket entry to go straight onto a different board. Is it possible for users to submit a ticket in a JSM form, have that ticket go straight to a different Project (Jira Software), but yet still be managed/visible in their own portal? It's important that there's visibility and collaboration between the dev teams and the requestor.

For more context, we have users without Jira accounts performing user acceptance testing, and we would want to utilize this for capturing bugs, but manage the bugs on a different project board and keep the JSM board for miscellaneous requests and bugs that are not a part of active projects.

[Emily Dang]

Hi @A.J. Apple, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA. There are a few ways this can be achieved.

1. One way is by using automation and creating a linked issue on the Jira Software board and have automation ensuring field values/ comments between the JSW issue and JSM ticket are synced.
2. The other way is simply by creating a new board in JSW, but create the board pointing to the existing JSM project. This way all the JSM requests will show up on the board. This method only works for company-managed Jira Software projects though.

[Deleted user]

Hello,

While using JSM cloud, we are using a forwarding rule to send mail to JSM mail's address to create issues and comments. But we are facing the following issues:

1. For some tickets, the comments are not tracked by JSM and hence not reflected on the portal, For example, an issue was created with Email-Type Request and when someone replies on that email, ideally a new comment should be added to the issue/ticket created earlier but It is not happening and that comment is not tracked anywhere on JSM, neither as a new ticket nor as a comment in the existing ticket.

2. To resolve the mentioned issue, one of the members of the community suggested including email in the project instead of forwarding emails to JSM's ID, We tried doing that also but we are not able to get it done and was facing the attached issue.

Please help us resolve this issue and Let me know if I'm missing something.

[Jason D'Cruz]

Every incoming email is logged in the Processing Logs along with details if a request or comment was created or if neither action happened. This would be a good place to start to understand why tickets or comments aren’t being created.

If you already have a support inbox, we’d recommend connecting it directly to JSM. We support Microsoft OAuth and are adding support for Google OAuth in the next month. From your screenshot it looks like you’ve attempted to connect using the Custom Mailbox feature. Please check this document to ensure that you’re following the correct steps. There could be cases where the credentials are correct but the mailbox has 2FA or some other settings limit the ability of less secure apps to access it. The best way would be to reach out to support or I could help debug further.

[MyDentons Support]

Hi there 

Is there anyway to export data from Service Management?  I want do to some deep dive analysis of incident raised in excel but I can't seem to find any option to extract my "Done" tickets.

Any help appreciated!

Thanks

Lee

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @MyDentons Support,

You should be able to export your JSM tickets from the issue navigator (navigate to Filters > advanced issue search).

Just define any selection of tickets right there and you can export the data to csv format. 

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Just beware of the multiline text fields :) They are no fun to export :D 

But for reporting I doubt you'll need those, so make sure to not include those or they will break your csv..

[Emily Dang]

@MyDentons Support, our team also recommends checking out this page, https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/export-issues/. 

[cissie chen]

hi everyone, wish you all well. Thanks Atlassian for giving us this opportunity to ask questions that we couldn't find a solution on forums. My questions are below:

1. Internal Comments

We use Jira Service desk/management (JSD) on-prem, all of our internal staff are counted as customers, and out IT team are the admin. We want to make sure all the customers can not see all the internal comments (which they can at the moment), all the customers are in the jira-access-users group, admins are in the jira-admin-user group, could we get some help please?

2. Automation.

How do we set up an automation where it auto escalate priorities based on date created?

i.e. If a low priority ticket hasn't been touched for 3 days, auto escalate to medium priority.

I have read https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicemanagementserver/automating-your-service-project-939926334.html & https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-rules-to-automate-repetitive-tasks/ but struggling

Any support will be appreciated.

Thanks

[Emily Dang]

Hi @cissie chen, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA.

1. You should be able to do this by removing browse project access for your internal staff on those projects.

2. There are two ways - one way is to use the schedule rule trigger once a day and match the JQL of low priority + last updated less than 3 days, and action on that (this tutorial might be helpful - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/how-to-escalate-overdue-issues-with-jira-software-automation).

   The second way is to set an SLA to when the ticket is updated/actioned and when the SLA triggers, it fires an automation to escalate.

[Mark Harding]

I have a couple of questions;

1. If a customer raises an Incident through the portal it will enter JSM but nothing will happen. I'd really like to be able to automate issues of a certain priority to "Create Major Incident" so that we can leverage the Alerting capabilities within OpsGenie. I've looked in Automation, but can't see anything there.

Is this possible?!

1a. possibility may be to automate an Incident to a Major Incident if it has not been touched for a defined period, based on its Priority.

Is this possible?!

2. I'd really like to be able to AutoAssign Incidents to a Team, preferably the team member that is on-call, rather than have to pick a specific individual.

Is this possible?!

3. is it possible to have different Clients to be able to raise Incidents / tickets through the portal but only see Applications / services that are applicable to them. We need multiple clients to use the portal, some use the same Application, some use different Applications, but we must keep anonymity.

Is this possible?

[Liron]

Hi there,

The work we are currently doing around merging Opsgenie incident capabilities with JSM incident capabilities are going to solve your first question, this is coming within a couple of months so stay tuned. 

As for the other questions I am going to refer to my colleagues to answer.

Thanks!

Liron

[Tom Bednarczyk]

Are there plans to allow using a Confluence Server space as a Cloud JSM Knowledge Base for the customer portal?

Currently, it is possible to create application links and then link a Confluence page in a request, but not the Confluence space as the KB on customer portal.

[Jose Flores _Jira_]

Hello New here and trying to take advantage of all features that Insight asset management has. my questions is, is there a way to create a dependency between objects based on a response? for example, i have Asset Details, inside of that i have Manufacturer, Model, OS. when i add some attributes to lets say for my Mac computers that asks for a manufacturer, when i choose Mac can i have other labels filter to only show Apple Models and MacOS? at the moment i have my dependencies set but it still shows all options so if someone pics Apple for Manufacturer and they move on to the next attribute which is Model it would still show all models even non Apple Models. Same goes for OS, it would still show Windows 10 Pro instead of just MacOS Big Sur. 

[Emily Dang]

Hi @Jose Flores _Jira_, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA.

It sounds like you would like to change the contents of an insight field based on the contents of another field. You can achieve this by utilizing Filter Issue Scope (read more here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/configure-the-insight-object-field/)

Filter issue scope will allow you to bring in the scope of another field in order to help narrow a search for a given field. The above documentation should outline further how you should be able to implement this in your specific use case.

[x504x Pulpo]

Do you have an estimated time for dark mode theme? I've been reading the community forums and see a lot of people complaining about using a plugin to be able to use a dark mode. Though I agree with mostly users when they say it should be native.

Thanks.

[Emily Dang]

Hi Datán, thanks for participating in the JSM AMA! Currently in Jira Service Management we offer dark theme on the Opsgenie side of products such as Alerts and Major incidents along with its corresponding apps.

On the main Jira interface however, this is something we have been explored and spiked but it is currently on the backlog. You can follow the main suggestion ticket to get all the updates: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-63150.

[David Meredith]

I hope this isn't too late but better AD integration would be amazing. 

We use Atlassian Access for SSO licence management and provisioning. So AD groups can be read...

The use case is Jira already knowing who a user's line manager is for approval.

There are addons that fill this gap but honestly it's such a standard feature in other ITSMs that it should be available OOB.

[Anthony Martin]

Big +1 here - in fact this functionality which we assumed was already in place was the only reason we were considering adding Access.  (specifically checking for Line Manager for approvals).  There are many other use cases too.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Well you can always import your organization structure in to Insight and use that data to manage the approvals.

Since a user account in Jira doesn't really have any additional properties that you can fill adding the user details/information regarding the user in an Insight Schema is the easiest and can very easily be read through automation.

We just need to wait now for better AD -> Insight integration on Cloud

[Amaresh Ray – Multiplier]

@Anthony Martin 

You can automate routing of approvals to managers from Azure AD/Okta using the Multiplier plugin on Jira cloud:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1224807/multiplier-azure-ad-and-okta-operations-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

This uses post functions to pull in the manager from Okta and insert that into the Approvers field in Jira. See this for more details: https://docs.multiplierhq.com/article/17-how-to-automate-manager-approval-using-azure-ad-and-jira-service-management

Here's a quick 90 second demo:

https://www.loom.com/share/61c1b3232e5b4008bb2794b71fb72743

[Robert Dyson]

We are struggling to figure out how we are meant to manage lots of request types for a single issue type. As they all have the same workflow and are dealt with by the same team, we use the same issue type. However, when adding a request type we have lots of fields that we don't need. It would be much easier if all these fields started off hidden and we could then add them to the agent view in the same way as the request form.  Much like team based projects.

This is especially frustrating when you add a new field to a screen and it them makes it visible to ALL request types that an agent sees.

Is there a way to make these fields default to hidden?

At the moment, it almost forces us to use lots of issue types which seems against the best practices. Can you help let us know how we are supposed to manage this properly?

[Jira Sr]

We're facing an issue setting up "Email Requests". When setting up new email requests everything goes smooth during office hours but if we're setting up an email request off hours, the emails are not read by Jira. This happens across multiple projects and emails.

Back at 12 AM EST the emails are read and tickets are created. This seems a very weird issue. Is there any timing bracket set on email requests?

Thank you.