yasoon meets customers: Meeting the demands of trading financial teams with Microsoft 365 for Jira

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

At Atlassian Team in Anaheim, we spoke with Michael Saia, DevOps Network Manager at Geneva Trading, about how his organization connects Microsoft 365 with Jira to support internal issue reporting and work planning.

In a financial trading environment, support teams need to respond quickly while preserving the details, permissions, and history associated with each request. Michael explained how fragmented conversations previously made that difficult, particularly when an issue needed to be escalated.

The core challenge: Important context was getting lost between Teams and Jira

Michael's teams work in financial trading, where they need quick answers and clear communication. Employees often reported problems through Microsoft Teams because that was where they were already working. The support team then had to copy the details into Jira manually.

During that handover, parts of the conversation could get lost, including troubleshooting steps, previous questions, and other useful context. This became even more difficult when a ticket had to be passed to another team. The new people involved did not always have the full history and sometimes had to ask the same questions again.

Connecting the Teams conversation to Jira

Geneva Trading connected Teams and Jira so that users could continue talking in Teams while the support team managed the issue in Jira. Depending on the situation, the team can create a Jira issue from a Teams conversation, link messages to an existing issue, or start a Teams conversation from Jira. Jira updates can also be shown in the related Teams conversation. This gives each tool a clear role:

• Teams is where people ask questions and discuss the problem.
• Jira is where the team tracks ownership, status, priority, and follow-up work.
• The connection helps keep the conversation available when the issue is investigated or passed on.

Users can still submit requests through the Jira portal when a structured form is needed. Teams simply provides another way to start or follow a request.

You can watch the full interview with Michael here on YouTube:

What admins should think about

Connecting the tools is only part of the setup. Before introducing a similar workflow, it helps to agree on a few basics:

• Define the workflow. Decide when a Teams conversation should become a Jira issue. You can also use automation actions and triggers to support specific workflows.
• Keep Jira as the main work record. Use Jira for status, ownership, and follow-up work, while Teams supports the conversation.
• Plan the setup. Make sure the Teams integration is deployed and the required Microsoft 365 access is approved.
• Keep structured JSM request forms where needed. For requests that require specific fields or approvals, users can still work with the JSM portal in Microsoft Teams.

The integration can make handovers easier and keep conversations connected to the issue, but clear ownership and access rules are still essential.

Key takeaways from connecting Microsoft Teams and Jira

Michael said his teams found the integration easy to use, and adoption grew naturally as people started asking to use it in other workflows. His experience shows that Teams and Jira can serve different purposes: people can discuss and troubleshoot issues in Teams, while Jira remains the source of truth for status, ownership, and follow-up work. Keeping the two connected helps preserve important context as an issue moves between people and teams.

A big thank-you to Michael for sharing his insights. It’s inspiring to see how connecting Jira and Microsoft 365 creates a more efficient and transparent systems of work.

Full disclosure: I'm Britta, and I work at yasoon, the company behind Microsoft 365 for Jira and I had the pleasure of interviewing our customer Michael.