What is a Halp ticket and how does it differ from a Jira ticket?

[Rob Horan]

I am learning about Halp with an eye towards integrating it with Jira and Confluence. One thing I keep coming across, but cannot find answers about is "Halp Tickets". 

The article "Jira Status and Workflow syncing" states "This article explains how Halp syncs the ticket status between the Jira issue and the Halp ticket"

What are these Halp Tickets?  Do they even matter when integrated with Jira? 

[Daniel Eads]

Hey Rob!

Just to add on in case you hadn't already seen details - there will be a Halp presentation for the NYC ACE this Thursday! Since the event is remote anyway, that made it extra convenient for Halp's cofounder and Atlassian's head of product integrations to dial in. If you had already gotten details about the presentation, then kudos for doing research in advance!

Details and registration here: https://ace.atlassian.com/events/details/atlassian-new-york-presents-getting-the-halp-conversation-started-and-consolidating-jira-service-desk-management/#/ 

Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Daniel

[Jack Brickey]

Halp is a company recently acquired by Atlassian. You might find this blog of interest. While more complicated it basically provides a means of creating and working customer issues directly in an IM session like in Slack. There is lots of info on the internet explaining Halp. Also see halp.com

[Rob Horan]

Hi Jack,

Thanks - I have been doing a lot of reading and watching videos, but the question I need answering remains: when integrated with Jira what role does the Halp ticket have?  Why does it even exist?

[Jack Brickey]

I think that is, as yet, unclear. AFAIK, there has been little shared publicly about Atlassian's exact plans here. It could be that they treat it just as they did with Trello and let it be its own product w/ little integration or maybe they will tightly couple it allowing agents to work in either environment on the same issue. Time will tell but expect that to be 12-24mo before it is well know. Regardless, I don't expect the Community to have the official word here. At least before it is announced in other official channels. Just my $0.02.

[Rob Horan]

Thanks Jack - I got something of an answer from Halp directly, by working on the Halp sandbox and asking there. This is what was shared with me:

Answer 1: when you're using Halp w/ the Jira integration, your Halp tickets should be identical to the corresponding ticket in Jira. In that way, Halp is acting as a middle man to facilitate the larger transaction between Slack & Jira.That being said, there are a few significant things that Halp does in Slack beyond being the middle man - The App Home for Halp is a great example, wherein users & agents can keep track of tickets they have in flight, make new tickets, reply to existing tickets, etc.Answers is another good example.

Answer 2: the way I would think about it is that Halp keeps a copy of your tickets so that we can better manage ticket changes without being 100% dependent on the Jira/Slack APIs. if Jira goes down, or if a ticket needs to be able to get moved from 1 slack channel to another, we are able do that using the data in the Halp ticket. But from the user experience perspective, they dont ever need to know the Halp ticket exists.another handy benefit of this is that if a team wants to use Halp that doesn't have Jira, they can get up and running easily and use the Halp back end, and escalate tickets to the team on jira

[Jack Brickey]

thanks for sharing. good info for sure. though i have to say I don't quite get the value at least for my needs. certainly see where non-jira teams that are using Slack would be interested. will be interesting to see where integration w/ Jira goes over time.