Capture Meeting notes on jira ticket?

[crbreingan]

I am looking for a way to have a custom comments-type field on our jira tickets where meeting notes can be captured. We've talked through several possibly solutions, but I have yet to find a solution that really makes sense. 

• We've thought about adding a custom text field, but then it's harder to provide tracability to who added what notes and on what date unless the user themselves put that information into the text field. We would like it to function like the comments section in jira where the user and timestamp are automatically recorded and displayed
• We've tried using comments for the meeting notes, but then they just got lost in the midst of other comments and conversations. We want a separate field that could be exported independently. 
• We've tried using Confluence for meeting notes, but then that defeats the purpose of the Jira ticket being the "one stop shop" for all relevant data. If it was discussed in a meeting, we want the snippet of the notes for this jira ticket to show up on Jira without having to go through several confluence pages. 
• There does not appear to be a custom comments field type in Jira by default, so the only other option would be to buy a plugin like "Enhancer Plugin for Jira"

Are there any builtin or free ways to accomplish this without a 3rd party plugin? Any thoughts or ideas on how to solve this would be greatly appreciated! 

Thanks! 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @crbreingan,

Starting from the limitations you are putting forward here (no use of an app, needing traceability, single source of truth), I see 2 options:

1. Just use the existing comments field of your issue. It has all the functionality you are looking for, so no costs required. Add a clear title to each comment to identify it as meeting notes.
2. Use Confluence, but make sure to add links from your issue to all meeting notes pages.

If it was my call, option 2 would be my preferred option without any doubt. First of all because Confluence is by far the better tool to write meeting notes in (see pre-existing templates, possibility to expose meeting notes in a place way more accessible for less experienced Jira users, decision logs etc). Second because the link between pages and issues is bi-directional. In my daily world, many meetings touch more than 1 Jira issue. On which issue would you post your meeting notes in that scenario, while you can perfectly link several issues to the same Confluence page. 

[Lea Spille]

May I ask a very late follow-up question? As a moderator, I would like to be able to take meeting notes in one page in Confluence and that my notes appear as comments on the relevant Jira tickets. I was hoping to find a way to embed Jira tickets in such a way that I can add a comment from the Confluence page for the meeting I'm on. So far, I haven't figured out a way. Any tips?