yasoon meets customers: Connecting clinical research teams with Jira, Outlook and Microsoft Teams

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At Atlassian Team '26 in Anaheim, Ellen Gruebbeling and Amber Stueve shared their personal experience using Jira, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams to coordinate work across their clinical research team at Washington University School of Medicine.

Their team supports an Alzheimer's clinical trial and collaborates with internal functional teams, finance, regulatory colleagues, third-party vendors, contractors, and Contract Research Organization users.

The customer challenge: Communication across many groups between Jira & Microsoft

Jira provides the team with a structured place to coordinate work, but much of the day-to-day communication happens through Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Keeping everyone informed through email alone was difficult.

Adding every stakeholder to every thread created inbox noise, while leaving people out made it harder for them to understand the latest status, decisions, and action items. The team needed a way to make relevant communication available from the Jira work item without asking everyone to change how they work.

The implemented workflow: Bringing Outlook and Microsoft Teams context into Jira

Using Microsoft 365 for Jira, the team connected relevant Outlook email conversations with Jira work items. Team members could check the issue for the latest email updates without being copied on the entire conversation.

Previous email exchanges could also be added to the Jira work item, helping the team retain the history behind a decision. Microsoft Teams supported a similar workflow. Team members could start a Teams conversation from a Jira work item and keep the related communication connected to the work being discussed.

This was particularly useful when a work item needed someone's attention. Instead of relying only on a Jira notification, the team could contact the person through a tool they already used throughout the day.

The outcomes Ellen and Amber observed

Ellen and Amber described several practical improvements:

• Teams could check the current status without searching through separate email threads.
• Finance, regulatory teams, vendors, and other stakeholders gained better visibility into relevant decisions.
• Conversations and resulting action items were easier to connect with the work in Jira.
• Documentation required less manual copying and moving of information between tools.
• Team members could continue using Outlook and Teams as part of their existing routines.

The value was not simply having more information in Jira. It was making the right context available to the people working on the issue.

The Jira & Microsoft adoption lesson: Find champions in every group

Amber explained that implementation and team buy-in were among the biggest challenges. Their approach started with leadership support, followed by identifying people in each functional group who could champion the workflow.

Some teams adopted it more quickly than others, so one-to-one guidance remained important. A useful lesson for other Jira admins is to position the integration as an extension of existing work rather than a requirement to move everything into Jira.

When people can continue using Outlook and Teams, the change feels less disruptive. Jira becomes the place where work and its supporting context come together.

What Jira admins can take from this

For organizations considering a similar setup:

• Define which communication should be connected to Jira and which should remain private.
• Use Jira as the structured work record while allowing teams to communicate in Outlook and Teams.
• Identify champions in leadership and within each participating functional group.
• Start with a workflow where missing context causes a clear operational problem.
• Provide targeted guidance instead of assuming every team will adopt the workflow at the same pace.
• Review access before sharing email or Teams content with Jira users.

Clinical research environments also require careful information governance. Each organization should determine which information may be placed in Jira, who may access it, how long it should be retained, and whether separate validated systems remain required.

Once the workflow and access rules are clear, these guides can help with implementation. Jira features in Outlook explains how users can work with Jira from their inbox, while Jira features in Microsoft Teams covers working with Jira issues from Teams conversations. Admins can also use Presets to structure recurring communication, including predefined participants, message content, sharing options, and built-in automation. This makes the workflow more consistent across functional groups without requiring every user to configure it from scratch.

Microsoft 365 for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace

Microsoft 365 for Jira helps teams connect the conversations happening in Outlook and Microsoft Teams with the work being coordinated in Jira. Rather than asking every stakeholder to change tools, it makes relevant communication and calendar context available alongside the Jira work item. As Amber explained, this can also support Jira adoption by allowing people to incorporate Jira into the Microsoft 365 workflows they already use every day.

Full disclosure: I’m Britta, and I work at yasoon, the company behind Microsoft 365 for Jira. I had the pleasure of interviewing our customers Ellen and Amber. The opinions they shared are their own and do not represent or imply endorsement by Washington University.

[Evelin Bayer - codefortynine]

Thanks for highlighting such an important topic, @Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_.
I really enjoyed reading your post!

What stood out to me wasn't just the integration itself, but the broader challenge it addresses: helping people reduce inbox noise and find the right information in the right place.

It's great to see such a common workplace challenge tackled together with customers and turned into a practical solution.

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

Thank you for appreciating the post, @Evelin Bayer - codefortynine :) It's a valuable learning opportunity for us as Marketplace partner, so we can understand how our customers improve their processes within their specific industry.