What are Smart Links and how to use them?

[#1]

If you aren’t familiar with Atlassian’s Smart Links, there is a good chance you may already be using them. But if you’re new to Atlassian or need a deeper dive, then this overview is for you!

What are Smart Links?

Smart links are windows into your work. It allows you to surface work in one tool when it lives in another. When you paste a page, project board, list, timeline, form, or calendar link into another Atlassian product, a Smart Link will display up-to-date information. Copy any url from Confluence, Jira, Atlas, Trello, or another third-party tool (like Google docs, Miro, Figma, etc.) and paste it where you want that information to live. The link will allow you to preview the page, embed the page directly, or edit it directly. Link Atlas tickets, Trello boards, Jira projects, or Confluence pages with a simple copy and paste.

                     

Different views

Smart Links give the user the ability to choose different views of how they want the link to show up and can be changed through the drop down menu. These include:

                             

Inline view

The most popular Smart Link, these are rendered inline, and surface the least amount of context. Instead of a URL, it will render as an inline Smart Link with your project name.

Card view

Card Smart Links provides slightly more context by surfacing a preview of the content, the business project name, including summaries and actions.

Embed view

Embedded Smart Links allow you to view pages, boards, lists, timelines, or calendar view in other Atlassian products without them having to leave the page. Read and edit a Google Drive document, manipulate your Figma file and more, all within your current page.

Taking Smart Links to the next level

Did you know that you could nest your Smart Links? In this example below, a Confluence page is opened from a Jira Work Management task that is opened from a Trello board. This person can make edits to the Confluence page all without leaving their current Trello tab.

What’s next?

Smart Links are continuously evolving and work with over 30 of your favorite tools like Google docs, Figma, Github, Dropbox and more. Let us know in the comments below what your favorite Smart Link feature is and what features you want to see come next!

[Stephanie Simons]

I love this feature. It is so helpful to be able to lead coworkers to all the great content we have around each project.

[Emilee]

So glad you find them so useful @Stephanie Simons . The team is working on the next iterations of Smart Links and we're all ears if there are use cases you want us to look at. 

[Mary Agueros]

Smart Links have been useful when I do not have time to transition the information from various Google Doc, usually located across multiple folders and owners,  into a Confluence article. Until the consolidation of the information can be completed  into an article, my team can find various links in one central location.

[Emilee]

@Mary Agueros Exactly! I'm doing it now to make it easy to find and track a large google sheet. I can quickly look at the embedded file without going too deep. 

[Tasha Turner]

We have employees that work out of Trello, but have the permission of internal customers in a Jira Service Management project, and would like to create Smart Links on their Trello cards to track issues they've created/submitted.  Will this be possible in the future?

[Juho Korhonen]

I still don't understand how this works (in Trello). I tried editing a card by pasting a link to it, but nothing happens. I find that adding links as attachments to cards is clunky, and it doesn't show any kind of preview.

Not necessarily related to this, but a better integration with Google Keep would also be nice in general.

[Emilee]

@Juho Korhonen In order for it to appear as a linked card you can't add the title first. See how I do it in this quick video for that same link. 

This isn't quite a smartlink feature but more of a what we call a link card. If you copy and paste a link to a Confluence page or a Jira issue, that will appear in the same way and you can view the linked page directly in Trello. 

Also sorry for the annoying grammarly button. I swear it's trying to be in my way. 

[Nikki Stephens]

I love the inline and card features! It makes for a much cleaner page! We use Embed with Gsuite and it's so efficient. 

I am curious if there is any plan to add additional supported platforms. Specifically, it would be fantastic to have one for Looker.  I know there are third-party apps to do this, but as my company does not permit connecting Looker to those apps for data security reasons- it would need to be a built-in functionality. 

Even if the link could only convert to an Inline, or Card, and not Embed, rather than a basic link that would be much better looking than adding a Looker emoji and a link each time for page continuity.  

[Michelle Herschell]

This looks super cool! How do you enable Smart Links into your Jira instance?

[Peter Quick]

Howdy,

With the Embedded option a URL to a form or other interactive data collector can be saved in Jira/Confluence.

Is there anything we can do (beyond education) to prevent users adding links to malicious site pages, or content outside our policy guides... PornHub download page for example, or dodgey forms on Reddit threads.

This has to be a safety concern for Atlassian too. Worse case scenario, embedded form with malicious code elements goes Boom inside a customer tenancy.

Cheers,

PeterQ

[Michiel Schuijer]

Hi,

I like the smart links and most people in our organisation as well. Now we've stumbled upon an issue since our GitHub organisation is made accessible only via our company VPN:

"restricted content" is what is showing on the page, even when connected to the VPN and logged into GitHub where I can see the content.

I would think the access permission would be respected once I am authenticated, but that does not seem to be the case.

I can't find any documentation on how to deal with or how Confluence Smart Links can work with restricted content, if at all.

I've revoked and re-connected my GitHub account to see if that would help, but don't see a difference and content is still hidden.

Does anyone have tips on how to deal with this?

[Barbara Acker]

Is there a possibility to track smart links? I am setting up a document management system and when a document becomes obsolete, I would like to see in which other documents the document is linked so that I know which documents are affected. Does anyone know that or have an idea how this could be realized?
Thanks so much :)

[Andrew Hewitson]

Smart Links in short text fields in the Sept 9-16 updates broke one of our text fields.  You can no longer have a period or an @ sign in a short text field without Jira thinking it's a Smart Link.  Not all text fields that have a period in them are a website Atlassian.  So  I'm going to have to say the inability to turn them on and off for a custom field is one of my least favorite parts.