Automate your workflows with Atlassian Teams in automations!

[#1]

Hey Community 👋

Happy to announce that you can now use Atlassian Teams natively in automation rules to keep your workflows scalable and accurate.

What's new?

Easily route issues and assign work to the right team with:

New automation actions

• Edit work item: When a work item is created in Team Mobile's board, set Team Mobile so work is tracked accurately.

• Field value changed: When a Team is set for a work item, move work item to that team’s board and notify them.

• Create work item: When an alert is created, create a work item and assign to Team Mobile.

• Clone work item: When 'cross-team' label is added, clone the work item into Mobile Team’s board and set team field to Team Mobile on cloned work item.

New automation conditions

• Work item fields condition: If team field is Team Mobile, then add a comment mentioning the Team Mobile engineering lead.

New automation triggers

• Field value changed: When Team field value is changed, move it to the newly assigned Team’s board.

• Member added or removed: When a member is added to the team, send them a welcome email with all onboarding materials. **currently only available in Confluence Cloud, Jira Cloud coming in March

How do I use it?

1. Go to Project settings → Automation (or Global automation).

2. Create a rule - select one of the trigger or actions shared above to use Teams in automations!

What's next?

• Assign work item to user in a team: If work item is assigned to Team Mobile, then assign this ticket to David who is in Team Mobile.

• User condition: For work item assigned to Team Mobile, ensure the assignee is in Team Mobile.

Tell us what you think

We’d love to see how you use this:

• What rules are you building with the Teams and in what product?

• What other Team-based automation would help your workflows?

Share your examples and feedback in the comments so we can keep improving this experience!

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @April Chi - I love these introductions to Teams field in Automation

One thing I do wish for Teams is to @ mention a Team in a comment / description / etc and not have it expand the members, but still notify as if it is an @mention 

Thanks

Yatish

[Josh]

@April Chi this is awesome!!! Thank you for prioritizing these incredible enhancements!

I cannot wait to see this roll out:

• User condition: For work item assigned to Team Mobile, ensure the assignee is in Team Mobile.

If you need any feedback there, please don't hesitate to reach out. This would unblock a bunch of use cases for us and really help Atlassian Teams be used more broadly in our organization.

[James Rickards (SN)]

You bloody ripper! This has so much potential!

[Milad Sayad]

Hi @April Chi

Good on you, these are great improvements. I love the trigger of a user added to a group/team.

Do you have any plans to allow us to add a smart value to populate the Team field dynamically? I just tested the Team field in Automation, and it seems we can only select a team from the Team field (i.e., Set) or copy from other issues (i.e., Copy), but we cannot insert text (e.g., smart value taken from the Asset object).

We have an Asset schema for our teams that also captures extra information such as manager, tech lead, default assignee, capability, various user groups, and a text field containing the Id of the team (manually hard-coded). We use these in a few global automation rules (e.g., set the team based on the assignee or vice versa) or to filter issues based on the user's team membership. In all these automation rules, we use the Additional fields with the team ID stored as text in the team object.

I think the ability to insert smart values is necessary to populate team fields dynamically. We also need JQL or another way (similar to current user conditions within automation) to check team membership dynamically.

Kind regards,

Milad

[Daniel Bagiński]

Hey, this is great! 

"I think the ability to insert smart values is necessary to populate team fields dynamically. We also need JQL or another way (similar to current user conditions within automation) to check team membership dynamically."

+1

assignee/reporter/custom user picker in membersof("Team") would be awesome.

[Adam Gołaszewski]

Finally, can we also have a way to notify a team when a work item is assigned to it? It would come in handy. 

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

This is very good.  BUT we really,really need a way to Notify a team in automation rules.

Susan

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Super promising.

One piece of feedback: it’d be great if the automation UI exposed team properties (lead, manager, channel) as smart values so we can mention/assign dynamically without hardcoding names. Otherwise, the “Team field changed → move to team board + notify” flow is going to be a huge quality-of-life improvement.

[Jared Schmitt]

Thanks @April Chi for expanding the uses of teams across the products.

Like @Milad Sayad mentioned, smart values are king. 

You also mentioned in your post a workflow like 

Work item fields condition: If team field is Team Mobile, then add a comment mentioning the Team Mobile engineering lead.

How do I store & get the engineering lead? Do teams already support user roles?

[Umesh Chaudhary]

Nice write-up — this looks like a powerful addition 👍

I’m curious though: how does this behave in larger orgs where teams overlap or share members? If one user belongs to multiple Atlassian Teams, how does automation decide which team context to apply in a rule?

Also, are there any limitations right now around using Teams in JQL conditions or advanced branching logic? It would be interesting to know how far we can push this in more complex workflows.

Would love to hear your thoughts or any edge cases you’ve already seen in practice 👀

[Zohaib]

Hi @April Chi 
Thank you for this new feature. However, I wonder if it would be visible to use smart value in that field, for example with a team name or team id to make it more dynamic. Currently, I tried and observe that is hard-coded value which make the rule not dynamic so much

[April Chi]

Hi all,

Thank you for the feedback and comments. I will respond to all of these individually.

@Yatish Madhav - 

One thing I do wish for Teams is to @ mention a Team in a comment / description / etc and not have it expand the members, but still notify as if it is an @mention 

We are currently looking at improving this in the coming quarters. I don't have a clear timeline yet, but will share more once I do so. If you would like to keep up to date, can you please vote for this ticket and comment your use case for this? https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-97755

This will help us prioritize this.

@josh (can't seem to tag you) - 

I cannot wait to see this roll out:

• User condition: For work item assigned to Team Mobile, ensure the assignee is in Team Mobile.

If you need any feedback there, please don't hesitate to reach out. This would unblock a bunch of use cases for us and really help Atlassian Teams be used more broadly in our organization.

FYI, this will be rolled out to all customers by the end of the month. Would love your feedback (good or bad!), will reach out once it's available. 

[Josh]

@April Chi that's great news! I'll be happy to give you feedback once I've had a chance to kick the tires.

[April Chi]

Hi @Milad Sayad 

Thank you for your feedback.

Do you have any plans to allow us to add a smart value to populate the Team field dynamically? I just tested the Team field in Automation, and it seems we can only select a team from the Team field (i.e., Set) or copy from other issues (i.e., Copy), but we cannot insert text (e.g., smart value taken from the Asset object).

We have an Asset schema for our teams that also captures extra information such as manager, tech lead, default assignee, capability, various user groups, and a text field containing the Id of the team (manually hard-coded). We use these in a few global automation rules (e.g., set the team based on the assignee or vice versa) or to filter issues based on the user's team membership. In all these automation rules, we use the Additional fields with the team ID stored as text in the team object.

I think the ability to insert smart values is necessary to populate team fields dynamically. We also need JQL or another way (similar to current user conditions within automation) to check team membership dynamically.

Unfortunately, today, there isn't an established link between Teams and JSM Assets yet - I will explore this more. But smart values for Teams is on our radar. At least initially, we are looking to ship attributes such as team name and teamId. 

I'd love to hear more about how you use JSM Assets though - let me know if you are happy to chat or continue this through email. 

@Zohaib , thank you for your feedback too. Your feedback is similar to the above around smart values:

Thank you for this new feature. However, I wonder if it would be visible to use smart value in that field, for example with a team name or team id to make it more dynamic. Currently, I tried and observe that is hard-coded value which make the rule not dynamic so much

I was wondering - what are your use cases for this? i.e. where do you intend to use this and in what workflows? Would introducing {{team.teamName}} and {{team.teamId}} be enough. What other smart values would you be looking to use for Teams and why?

@Arkadiusz Wroblewski - 

One piece of feedback: it’d be great if the automation UI exposed team properties (lead, manager, channel) as smart values so we can mention/assign dynamically without hardcoding names. Otherwise, the “Team field changed → move to team board + notify” flow is going to be a huge quality-of-life improvement.

Unfortunately, Atlassian Teams do not have a team leader or manager today. Is this something you are looking for in Teams natively? Also same as the above, smart values is on our radar at the moment. Would specific smart values are you looking for and how would you use them? For example, {{team.teamName}} and {{team.teamId}} seem to be table-stakes. Let me know.

@Milad Sayad @Zohaib @Arkadiusz Wroblewski - If you are interested in smart values for teams in automations, can you both please vote for this suggestion and comment with your use cases? This is useful for us to keep track of all your feedback for prioritization 🙏

Suggestion ticket here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-97757

[April Chi]

Hi @Adam Gołaszewski and @Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ ,

This is very good.  BUT we really,really need a way to Notify a team in automation rules.

Finally, can we also have a way to notify a team when a work item is assigned to it? It would come in handy. 

Thank you for the feedback. This is also on our radar. We are currently in the midst of prioritizing more automation work. I don't have a timeline yet but acknowledging that we have seen recurring feedback on this. 

Questions:

- What is your use case for notifying teams i.e. are you sending an email to tell team members that you have a new work item assigned to your team or are you sending a specific custom email?

- Do you expect all team members to be notified when the team is assigned to a work item, or only a subset of members? 

- Do you expect this to be an automation? Or can it be a default setting that can be turned on and off in team notification settings? i.e. when a team is associated with a Jira work item, all members of the team get a notification, but they can turn these notifications off. 

Let me know and once again, appreciate your time and effort in providing this feedback 🙏 Thank you.

There is this suggestion that you can vote for, would love if you could vote there and share your use case: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-82542

[Ben Dollinger]

@Philipp Göllner _XALT_ was sagst du dazu?