yasoon meets customers: Integrated services with Jira and Microsoft in the food ingredient industry

Britta Neugebauer [yasoon]

How can IT teams keep critical Microsoft Teams conversations connected to incidents and support requests in Jira? At Atlassian Team in Anaheim, we spoke with Michael Pelfrey, IT Operations Manager at Skidmore, about how his team uses Microsoft 365 for Jira for internal support, incident management, and agile development.

Skidmore operates in the food ingredient industry with approximately 250 employees. The team needed to support internal customers efficiently while ensuring that Jira contained the information required to manage and escalate requests.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np6iJ_ZxvCA

Keeping incident conversations in Microsoft connected to Jira

During critical incidents, troubleshooting conversations often happened in Microsoft Teams. Although Skidmore was already using the native Teams integration for Jira, the IT team still had to summarize those discussions manually in the Jira issue.

With Microsoft 365 for Jira, the team can start a Teams chat from an incident and keep the conversation connected to the Jira work item. They also use an automation to create a backup of the chat. According to Michael, this helps support staff retain important context when reviewing or escalating an incident.

The tools have distinct roles:

• Microsoft Teams supports real-time communication and troubleshooting.
• Jira tracks ownership, status, priority, and resolution.
• The integration Microsoft 365 for Jira keeps relevant conversations connected to the work.

Not every Teams message needs to be linked to Jira. The goal is to retain the context required to understand decisions and continue the work.

Making the JSM portal easier to access in Microsoft

Michael also highlighted the Microsoft Teams app for their Jira Service Management portal. It allows employees to raise and follow requests from Teams while the IT team continues managing the structured service process in Jira.

Michael said this increased engagement with the portal and reduced the number of support requests arriving by email.

Key takeaways from connecting Microsoft Teams and Jira

For Michael, connecting Jira and Microsoft is less about individual features and more about keeping information in context. Employees can continue using Teams for communication and support requests, while the IT team manages incidents and related work in Jira. Relevant conversations stay connected to the Jira issue instead of becoming another information silo.

That becomes increasingly interesting as AI enters these workflows as well. AI-assisted summaries or suggested next steps become more useful when they have access to communication that is actually relevant to the Jira work, rather than simply more information.

Thank you, Michael, for sharing how Skidmore connects Microsoft Teams and Jira to preserve incident context, improve access to IT support, and give its IT team a more structured way to manage work.

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