7 most promising apps for Atlassian products in 2019

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We all use Atlassian products for different reasons - their flexibility, functionalities or availability. Whatever the reason, we should trust them to get our day-to-day work done. However, it's often a love-hate kind of relationship, because the more use cases are there proving Atlassian software is for everyone, the more features feel like missing in all of them. Thankfully, the creators thought about this too, and created a place this one place where anyone can find something that meets their needs and extends software's features - Atlassian Marketplace. Currently, there are up to four thousand apps, and this number sill increases, making it a heaven on earth for those looking for apps that will widen the Atlassian products' potential. We decided to take a closer look at the newest apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, and chose 7 most promising ones.

7 most promising apps for Atlassian products

Customizable requests list with My Requests Extension for Service Desk

Customizing My Requests screen with My Requests Extension for Jira Service Desk 

Starting with something dedicated more to the customers than to admins - My Requests Extension for Jira Service Desk. With this app, the users can make their requests list more personalized by adding fields and custom fields to display as columns, as well as drag and drop them to present the information in the order they will like the most. They can also sort columns but Customer Request Type and Organizations alphabetically, and define specific criteria to narrow down the list. Moreover, clients can save the created filter and share it with others from his Organization or user group. 

Solve requests faster and improve customer satisfaction with Chat for Jira Service Desk 

Source: Chat for Jira Service Desk on youtube.com

Implementing a live chat into Jira Service Desk is an easy way to improve customer satisfaction and deal with the clients' requests faster. Chat for Jira Service Desk is one of the apps we can consider when looking for an user-friendly and practical tool enabling the users to talk directly with the vendor's support team and solve their problems instantly. It boosts not only the pace of requests resolution but also the SLA, and adds some human touch to the support process.

Easy sprint workload management with Capacity Tracker

Source: Capacity Tracker on marketplace.atlassian.com

Capacity Tracker is one of those apps that boosts dev teams' productivity and keeps things organized. It helps visualize work distribution and allocation, which makes it easier to plan sprints. Also, we can configure the availabilty of the team members, their daily commitment, mark if someone's on leave or vacations, and then correspondingly assign tasks to the right people. Also, a clear visual presentation of how many tasks is assigned to a team member, we can easily identify if someone's overloaded with work and prevent delays by delegating some tasks to those who have some free space. 

Intuitive learning center with LearnUp for Confluence - LMS

Source: LearnUp for Confluence on marketplace.atlassian.com

To give our team membes a chance to learn new things, we can look into apps such as LearnUp for Confluence which help create clear and intuitive learning center. We can configure everything from the structure and sections to interactive content like PREZI presentation to quizzes. Also, we can monitor the learners' individual progress and how they're doing with the course, as well as present key indicators such as quizzess success rate, completion rate, how many people finished the course, and much more.

File storage inside Confluence with Smart Attachments

Source: Smart Attachments for Confluence on marketplace.atlassian.com

If we're missing a file storage functionality in Confluence, we should check out Smart Attachments for Confluence. We don't have to choose between Dropbox or OneDrive, and then worry about an app that will enable us to embed the files stored there into our Confluence page. This app can easily replace external file storages or if we already have one, we can import the project documents from it. Also, it adds Folder attachments macro, which embeds a folder with needed files onto the Confluence page and automatically gives access to them to all team members working on the page. 

Automate and control your PullRequest workflow with Workzone

Source: Workzone: PullRequest Workflow on marketplace.atlassian.com

To make the pull requests workflow smoother, we should take a closer look at Workzone: PullRequest Workflow. This app enables us automate most of the pull request approval process by automatically assigning branches and file patterns to the pre-defined reviewers, as well as merging a Pull Request when all or some of the reviewers approve it. Of course, we configure all the settings, so we define the reviewers to the branches, as well as conditions that will block or allow the merge. 

Extend your Service Desk features on Cloud with Extension for Jira Service Desk

Creating dynamic requests forms with Extension for Jira Service Desk  in Jira Service Desk Cloud

No one wants to deal with endless forms to fill, and there are some solutions on Marketplace that help with this. Extension for Jira Service Desk, even though it's been on the Marketplace for some time, now is also available on Cloud instances. That's why it's also on this list. For now, Cloud version of the app features Dynamic Forms enabling us to define which options and values from such custom fields as Radio Buttons, Single Selects, and Checkboxes will show another fields with additional questions. This way we go from the general to the particular, making our request forms shorter and user-friendlier. 

Choosing the right Atlassian app

Choosing the right app can be hard with how many of them is available on the Atlassian Marketplace. At Jira Service Desk Day 2018, the San Francisco Bay Area AUG leader Matt Doar listed five questions we need to answer before buying an app. We need to consider how the app might scale, ask a vendor about how the app will work with the big amount of data to process, go through the versions history to look into the recorded bugs and see if the app is regularly updated. Also, we should look for past response times and go to Atlassian Community, AUG, Atlassian Summit, reviews on Marketplace to see what's the experience of other users of the app. 

If you'd like to learn more about enhancing your Jira Service Desk, read more on the subject on the Community:

• 7 most common concerns of Jira Service Desk users (and solutions to them)
• How to improve your customers' journey through Jira Service Desk Server
• How to enable self-service in Jira Service Desk, pt.1