Asana features we'd like to see in Jira. Add yours.

[M]

Jira is king but Asana is the revolutionary upstart. It has some lightweight nifty features I'd like to see in Jira

* Follow feature.

The reality of many modern projects is that contributors are dispersed geographically and across organisations - a dev team in Bangalore , a designer in Cape town, an investor in Kerry. The magic of this follow feature is in it's simplicity in adding contributors to a single task.

Asana makes this easy. Add any email address to a task or project and that person -internal or external- can monitor and contribute to that individual task or project with a 5 second sign-up. They can immediately add comments to a task just by replying to an email. They only see what you want them to see.

I've used this recently to keep a lot of people updated together. I created a task called Project Update and had a dozen followers with various interests. They simply replied to that task via email which was added to comments. They didn't have to log in to anything and Asana kept it all quite neat.

* Quick entry

Press enter for new task, type, press enter - done.

We need a bulk entry system in Jira - and no, CSV uploading is not what I'm talking about.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Enhancements like this are better logged in Atlassian's Jira at http://jira.atlassian.com

Jira mostly supports the first suggestion already though. Assuming correct configuration, anyone can sign up and add themselves as a watcher. They can see only what you decide. Again, with a bit of config, emails can become comments. On top of that, you've got activity streams, the ability to embed information in other systems, and so-n. I've only worked with one Jira that wasn't used in at least three continents, and even this one has users scattered from one end of the UK to the other.

For Quick entry, already got it - keep your "create issue" screen simple, and clicking "create issue" pops a box with the basics. You can even do that on sub-tasks on issues with single summary entries.

For bulk entry, yes, I think it's missing, it's not quick to belt in a string of issues at high speed. I'm not sure how to fix that, although, Jira 5.1's inline editing would make a string of quickly belted-in issue very easy to revise and fix on the fly after a quick entry. There's options other than CSV too - Bob Swift's command line interface makes scrioting quite easy, and there's plenty of interfaces you could code for.