How can I send a series of orientation emails over time to new users?

[Beth Schaefermann]

I am currently struggling with helping people to orient to the product. We have an enterprise license to Atlassian University, but you know that saying about leading horses to water. We have also created a fair amount of tutorial content ourselves, and we are conducting regular demos. Still, people need "sips" before they can consume the whole...trough. This leads me to my question:

When I installed JIRA on my local machine to muck about and experiment outside of our enterprise installation, I started to receive these really great "sip" emails (so exciting) about next steps I might take in configuration, etc., and they appear to be hitting my inbox every day or every few days. I need something like this so that I can send orientation "sips" to my "horses" so that they are ready to drink from the firehose when they join a demo, but I don't want to track this manually per person as they get added into the system. Ideally, there would be some sort of Orientation setting that would send them, say, ten pre-configured mails over time to help them to slowly digest what they need to know.

It looks like Atlassian has something in place that does this for them for users who download and install the app. What is it, and is it something that I can use/ turn-on/ buy? Part of JIRA? A Plug-in? Another service? Something I just don't know about an email server?

[Jon Silvers [Atlassian] · Accepted solution]

Beth, we (Atlassian) have built the automated email series through a service called ExactTarget, and then we wrote a lot of scripts to send the emails at the proper time. ExactTarget provides features typical of other email service providers -- subscription management, list management, multi-part MIME email sending, etc. -- and it also has a decent set of APIs that allowed us to set up a middleware application to manage the daily triggered sends.

The content that we send was developed in-house by our product marketing team, and much of it is available on our quickstart guides which you can find here: http://quickstart.atlassian.com.

Hope that helps!

[Beth Schaefermann]

Thanks, Jon. I think it's great and will look into it!

[Rumceisz]

Hi Jon,

is there a plugin which we could do a regular newsletter with?

It would be similar to the automated service except we could edit the content of htese emails.

Regards,
Rumi

[Jon Silvers [Atlassian]]

By plugin, I assume you're asking about the Atlassian plugins from marketplace.atlassian.com, but please correct me if that's not true. There are no plugins to our products that I'm aware of that give you the ability to generate email newsletters, or that would provide the abiiity to comply with the US CAN-SPAM laws that require email senders to manage opt-in/out.

Another nice tool to check out is Campaign Monitor http://www.campaignmonitor.com/ -- one of the best newsletter products on the market, and perfect for simple use-cases like monthly sends. I believe they have a feature to automatically scoop up an RSS feed and turn it into a nicely-formatted email newsletter.

[JamieA]

I like the idea, although often I want to drown the user in the trough, rather than get him to sip from it.

I imagine you'd have to write your own thing for this, although it occurs to me this would be a useful addition to the "jira hero" plugin. You wouldn't want to get an email on jql before you created your first filter, and as you get badges for doing things like that in jira hero, it could also send an email explaining how to use JQL to create advanced queries.

That way the orientation mails would have bearing on what familiarity the user had with the product so far.

[Beth Schaefermann]

True and true. The blocker on Hero on production for us is the ability to turn it off either as a personal setting (ideal) or project setting, with off as the default (https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/browse/JHERO-33). Otherwise, we've had some fun with it on staging.

But I like your thinking.

I would, though, see orientation as separate, for the same reason. Sometimes, it's inappropriate for certain clients to...have fun...but they still need to orient to the system.

[JamieA]

Agreed... imho jira here is too early for production, but I think it has potential. I'd also like to see the ability to deploy some of the atlassian university walkthrough stuff to our own instance. Not what you asked for but it's the same goal.

For your use case you could write a plugin... as the date the user is created is now stored, you could just have jira send them weekly emails for 10 weeks or something.

[Beth Schaefermann]

Ah-ha! Well, I needed an objective for my first plug-in. Maybe I found one. :)

[JamieA]

Thanks for the points ;-) But I'm interested in ideas around this too, hopefully other people will chip in.