Using Jira Service Management Cloud Portal for workstation reservation

Question

We have a use case where employees can reserve a workstation on a date and a time slot (AM/PM/Full Day) through customer portal. If a workstation has been reserved on the specified date and time, the ticket submission should not go through.

Our idea to implement this requirement is as follow:

1. Create a dropdown custom field that lists out all the workstations

2. Create a date custom field for the reservation date

3. Create a dropdown field for the time slots with three options (AM/PM/Full Day)

4. Add a validator in the workflow create transition where this validator will check if there is a ticket exists for a given workstation, date and time slot. If yes, throw a validation error message, otherwise the ticket will be submitted.

However, the problem with the #4, the users can only know whether a workstation is available on a selected date/time after they press the submit button which is not a good user experience.

The questions to the community that we need help with:

1. Is there any way for us to list down all the available workstation for the selected date and timeslot in the customer portal? It means the list of options for the workstation custom field will be dependent on the date and timeslot selection. We doubt this is possible because of the limitation of the Jira Cloud but we still want to try our luck.

2. Or, we are thinking if there is any calendar plugin or equivalent to be displayed on Jira Service Management Cloud Customer Portal. This calendar will show all the workstation reservation that has been made, so the users will know which slots are still available for a reservation. We have tried to find one but unable to find. We thought it might be because of the keywords we use. Please let us know if there is such plugin.

Thanks!

Priska Aprilia · Answer

Hi Earl,

Thanks for the answer. I have a few questions.

1. We have Insight Asset Management, could you please elaborate how we can leverage this for our use case? We know that we can create the workstations as CIs/objects. But how is it different from using a normal Jira custom field as far as checking the availability is concerned?

2. If the end users are not licensed Jira users nor Confluence licensed users, can they still see all the Jira issues tie to the Team Calendar? Assuming they have access to the Confluence Space through Jira Service Management Customer Portal.

Earl McCutcheon · Answer

Hello @Priska Aprilia ,

Thanks for reaching out, and as you noted on point 4 there is not an option to remove the items from the list if not available, and all options would be present in the form.  And looking at this the basic breakdown is a two-parter on asset management and asset bookings/checkouts via time tracking.

You may need to tie Jira to an asset management system or CMDB where that asset is already managed.  Check out the following KB article that has more details:

* Jira Service Management: Asset Management

Alternatively, you also mentioned tieing into a calendar and could look into alternate apps.  Using a calendar is a good approach and have your users check availability before filing the request as part of the process would be a great approach, and a good approach for this is to tie into the calendar capabilities in confluence for a solution.  The following threads discuss some of these options including tieing Jira issues to team calendars, as well as using additional apps, the third link has a posted a full script to do this using one of the recommended third-party apps for confluence:

* https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Confluence-Team-Calendar-linked-with-Jira/qaq-p/97119
* https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Jira-for-a-booking-system/qaq-p/335871
* https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Looking-for-a-booking-reservation-tool-in-Confluence/qaq-p/745813

Hope this info helps

Regards,
Earl