Is there a way for a Jira Cloud admin to map Slack usernames manually?

[Andrew Krigline]

Per this issue, it looks like the new Jira Cloud Slack integration is ... frankly really difficult to onboard into.

Is there some way for a Jira Cloud admin to manually map Jira usernames to Slack usernames in order to avoid every user in the company Slack having to individually interact with this bot?

[Trevor Thompson · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andrew Krigline 

The Jira Cloud Slack integration should be a breeze to onboard into. Yes, each user needs to authenticate the Jira for Slack app in order to interact with it in Slack.

Unfortunately, there's no way for an Admin to manually map Jira usernames to Slack usernames. All authentication is handled on a per-user basis. So users will have to authenticate themselves, but there is relatively low friction involved (first time they attempt to interact, they will be asked to log in, and the log in flow should only take a few seconds). 

Let me know if you have any other questions or how I can help
Trevor Thompson
Product Manager, Product Integrations

[Andrew Krigline]

We recently converted from Jira-server to Jira-cloud. We had a home grown bot that combed messages looking for Jira Tickets and unfurled them. The bot was time consuming to maintain and one of the draws of Jira Cloud was the official Jira integration.

Thing is, convincing all 90 or so people in Slack to take the couple of minutes to mess with the Jira Bot integration is not as easy as it sounds. It would be about 500 times more efficient if one of our Jira admins could manage this mapping (one person's 30 minutes versus 90 people's 3 minutes, in addition to all of the interruption cost).

It would be better still if the official bot would do a basic unfurl for all channels it was part of if it didn't know who was who. It shouldn't need that information to just display the basics of the ticket?

IMO this would be a pretty big boon to the official bot's functionality. I'll happily submit feedback to this effect if you'll point me in the right direction.

[Trevor Thompson]

Hey again Andrew, thanks for the insights! They are insanely valuable.

>Thing is, convincing all 90 or so people in Slack to take the couple of minutes to mess with the Jira Bot integration is not as easy as it sounds. 

Agreed! What functionality are you hoping these 90 users unlock by doing this? We kind of look at authenticating as less of an "admin tells you to do so" thing but rather a "you do this when it makes sense" (aka if you try to take some action to interact, like paste a link, it will ask you to log in)

>It would be better still if the official bot would do a basic unfurl for all channels it was part of if it didn't know who was who. It shouldn't need that information to just display the basics of the ticket?
Unfortunately it does, as we need to verify that the user who shares the link has access to the issue itself. Otherwise, users could unfurl tickets they don't have access to and see information they should not see (like summary, etc.)

The limitation for mapping is for 2 reasons
1. We need to generate user tokens for each user, so that we know who they are in Slack (and map to Atlassian) and can act on their behalf in Slack

2. Slack does not let you, as an admin, generate users on behalf of _other_ users. We're working with Slack on this right now through our partnership, but I would give caution around expecting anything any time soon.

I hope this helps clarify a few things for you
Trevor

[Zach Haehn]

I have a similar issue - we have several users in our Slack channel that are external guests on our channel.  When they try to connect the Jira Cloud plugin, they get a message saying "You're not authorized to install Jira Cloud on <our slack organization name>."  How are they supposed to make this happen if they can't authorize themselves?  Is this something an admin can do on their behalf?

[Trevor Thompson]

Hey @Zach Haehn unfortunately we don't have a solution for enabling Guest users to authenticate themselves *today*. We are looking at this feature and have a workaround in mind. I've opened a feature request in our public Jira issue tracker, please vote and watch so you can get updates on it.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/API-180

[Andrew Krigline]

> Agreed! What functionality are you hoping these 90 users unlock by doing this? 

We'd like to replicate the behavior of our homegrown bot we used before migrating to Jira Cloud. I'll try to summarize it's behavior as best as I understand it:
- We integrate with this jira lib. which looks like it takes a single JIRA login credential (presumably an admin's) to use the REST api.

- Define several projects to search through.

- Listen in Channels the bot is added to for a regex pattern matching JIRA issue identifiers.

- Search via the JIRA api for the issue.

- If there's a hit, send a message to that channel that includes a link to the issue as well as the title of the issue, its Assignee, Sprint, Priority, and Status.

This is almost the "Compact" Issue preview available in the official bot. But the biggest difference is that none of the individual users in Slack had to mess with authenticating Jira to get the basics of a Jira Issue displayed when we mentioned the issue in a channel.

The bot obviously didn't work in Direct Messages which was a major downfall, but that was offset by the ease of use. It would rock if the official bot did this same/similar behavior for 'free', but kept its expanded previews for users who have authenticated. Our homegrown solution had a lot of issues and maintenance is an expense that's hard to justify sometimes. We hoped that upgrading to Jira Cloud would give us all this and more, only now we realize it does slightly different things.

Your points about authentication are very valid points. I honestly don't know how our homegrown bot would react to hidden issues, but it probably wouldn't find the issue to link. IMO the "basic" unfurl could ignore hidden issues, or provide only a link to that issue with no details displayed.

I don't understand how generating users fits into this equation though. All of the slack users exist, and all of the Jira users exist, we just need to match them up right? A Jira admin could provide this mapping as a baseline, and if an authentication process overrides it, so be it.

[Trevor Thompson]

The bot obviously didn't work in Direct Messages which was a major downfall, but that was offset by the ease of use. It would rock if the official bot did this same/similar behavior for 'free', but kept its expanded previews for users who have authenticated. Our homegrown solution had a lot of issues and maintenance is an expense that's hard to justify sometimes. We hoped that upgrading to Jira Cloud would give us all this and more, only now we realize it does slightly different things.

The Jira for Slack app will show link previews / unfurl in direct messages and private channels that the Jira bot is not a part of :) 

I don't understand how generating users fits into this equation though. All of the slack users exist, and all of the Jira users exist, we just need to match them up right? A Jira admin could provide this mapping as a baseline, and if an authentication process overrides it, so be it.

Sorry, I was talking about user tokens that are generated from Slack. User tokens are required for some interactions with our integration that take place in the Slack side of things. 

I'm going to keep the user mapping feature request in mind. Like I said before, it's something we're working on Slack closely with. Unfortunately it's an inherently difficult problem to solve (this doesn't scale well, what about mistakes, could we do it automatically, if we did it automatically would doing it on matching email work, etc.) However there may be additional ways for us to help you solve this problem.

I would definitely encourage you to give it a try. Once users start sharing links, they'll get prompts to log in and it only takes a few seconds to do so. We've found this to grow organically very well in a company, so I imagine it would for yours too. Thanks again for the feedback and conversation about what you're looking for our app to do :) 

[Filip S_]

The Jira for Slack app will show link previews / unfurl in direct messages and private channels that the Jira bot is not a part of :) 

We are using JIRA Cloud, and link previews / unfurl in direct messages (me and someone else) do not work. Only in connected channels. Is there some setup needed? Thx

Slack app: slack.com/apps/A2RPP3NFR-jira-cloud?next_id=0