Calendar Planning in Jira now on cloud: How teams Use Flexible Calendar to Manage Projects and Event
Hello Atlassian Community! I’m Oliver from Reinwok
If you've ever tried to plan events, track team availability, or manage project timelines in Jira, you know that Jira's built-in tools don't always give you the visual, calendar-based view you need. That's the problem we set out to solve five years ago with Flexible Calendar for Jira on Data Center - and after serving 100+ organizations on DC, we're excited to share that the Cloud version is now live.
In this article, I want to share what we've learned from years of building calendar tooling for Jira teams.
What Flexible Calendar Does
The idea behind Flexible Calendar is simple: bring calendar planning directly into Jira so your events and issues live in the same place.
You can create calendars from Jira projects, JQL queries, saved filters, or as standalone event calendars. Each calendar gets its own color, so when you overlay them, it's easy to see what belongs where. Beyond the standard month/week/day views, a Timeline view lets you group tasks horizontally by project, assignee, issue type, or other fields. And you can reschedule issues or events by dragging them on the calendar - the underlying Jira dates update automatically.
But the features only tell half the story. Here's how teams are actually using them.
Cross-Project Visibility for Project Managers
One of the most common requests we hear: "I manage three projects and I need to see everything in one place."
With Flexible Calendar, you create separate calendars from different Jira projects, JQL queries, or saved filters - each with its own color - and overlay them in a single view. A project manager running an engineering project, a QA cycle, and a client deliverable can see all three timelines at a glance without switching between spaces.
The Timeline view takes this further by letting you group tasks by project, assignee, issue type, epic, or fix version. This is especially useful for spotting scheduling conflicts or identifying which team members are overloaded across projects.
Tip: Create a JQL-based calendar using a query like fixVersion = "Q1 2026" to get a release-scoped view that pulls from multiple projects automatically.
Team Events, Holidays, and Meetings Alongside Jira Issues
Not everything that belongs on a calendar is a Jira ticket. Team meetings, company holidays, deployment windows, vendor deadlines, office events - these are things your team needs to see, but they shouldn't clutter your backlog.
Flexible Calendar supports custom event types with their own icons and configurable reminders. You can create types like "Team Meeting," "Company Holiday," "Business Trip," "Deployment Window", "Risk," and schedule them right alongside your Jira issues.
Each event can include participants, a link (to a Zoom/Google Meet/Teams call or a shared document), and a reminder that notifies participants before the event starts. Event types have a default reminder, but users can override it or turn it off per event.
Tip: HR teams often create a dedicated "Company Events" calendar with event types for holidays, all-hands meetings, and team-building activities, then share it read-only with the entire organization.
Linking Meetings and Milestones to Jira Issues
You can link calendar events directly to Jira issues, creating a two-way relationship. A "Linked Events" panel appears on the issue itself, so when your team opens a ticket, they can immediately see associated meetings, deadlines, milestones or risks. And when you open an event, you see all linked tickets.
Here are some ways teams use this:
- Release coordination: Connect deployment events and code freeze milestones to the tickets included in the release.
- Incident management: Associate post-mortem meetings and follow-up reviews with the bug tickets that triggered them.
- Action tracking: Schedule an event as a deadline for when something needs to get done - essentially using the calendar as a visual to-do list with built-in reminders tied to the relevant issues.
- Client meetings: Link client review sessions to the deliverables being presented, so the team knows exactly what's on the agenda.
From the panel, users can create a new event and automatically link it to the current issue, or search for and link an existing event - all without leaving the issue view.
Reporting and Sharing Schedules with Stakeholders
Sometimes the people who need to see the schedule aren't in Jira - executives, external clients, or cross-functional partners.
The Export to PDF and Excel feature lets you export any date range up to a year, with customizable columns. You choose which fields to include for Jira issues (status, priority, assignee, project, etc.) and for custom events (participants, etc.). Your active quick filters are applied to the export, so you can generate focused reports.
For people who are in Jira but don't want to navigate to the calendar, the Dashboard Gadgets keep schedules visible:
- The Calendar Gadget embeds a full or compact calendar view on any Jira dashboard.
- The Upcoming Events gadget displays a filtered list of upcoming events, organized by calendar, event type, time period, or participant, in a simple table format.
Lessons from 5+ Years on Data Center
Permissions matter a lot. Different teams need different levels of access. We built a three-tier permission model (Admin, Use, Read Only) plus global group visibility settings so admins can control who sees the calendar feature at all, and calendar owners can control who does what on each calendar.
Quick Filters are essential. When you have multiple calendars with hundreds of events, you need a way to slice the view without creating a new calendar. JQL-based quick filters let you toggle visibility on the fly - for example, showing only high-priority items or filtering to a specific assignee.
Reminders make a difference. Every event type has a default reminder that users can override or disable per-event. One of our DC customers even uses this as a lightweight personal reminder system - they create quick events just to remind themselves to follow up on an action or check on a task.
Getting Started
If you want to try it out, Flexible Calendar for Jira is available on the Atlassian Marketplace for both Cloud and Data Center. Full documentation is at Documentation.
We'd Love Your Feedback
We've been iterating on this product for five years based on feedback from our Data Center users, and we want to keep that going on Cloud. If you try it out and have suggestions, questions, or run into anything unexpected, feel free to reach out via our contact page, email us at support@reinwok.com, or drop a comment below.
What does your current calendar planning workflow in Jira look like? I'd be curious to hear how other teams are solving this.