How Worklogs integrated with Elements Connect for better customer experience

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Integration is the key to success! 

How Worklogs integrated with Elements Connect for better customer experience?

You are tracking the time your team members spend on Jira issues and would like to have a better overview of their work? What if you could bring external data inside all of those Jira issues and display up-to-date information only? Well, from now on it’s possible! We have a pleasure to announce that Worklogs - Time Tracking and Time Reports integrates with “Elements Connect”. 

The Atlassian Marketplace is a vast ecosystem with thousands of apps that provide teams all around the world with unlimited ways to deliver their work successfully. Its great strength lies in endless combinations of apps that result in smooth and optimized workflows in organizations of all types of industries. It is safe to say that thanks to Atlassian app integrations, teams can enhance the way they communicate, collaborate, track work, plan and release new products. And it is true for all the projects - from anything as simple as automating everyday tasks to alleviating the complexity of cloud migration.

All about data

Worklogs – Time Tracking and Reports, SolDevelo’s app on the Atlassian Marketplace, has been used by over 1500 customers worldwide so far. Recognized with the Cloud Fortified badge, it helps to keep track of all team’s daily tasks and uncover where most of the time is being spent. Users can register hours spent on Jira tasks, as well as track and report time devoted to project issues. Worklogs are built on top of the Jira time tracking system and allow users to create customizable time-based reports on the fly. In order to obtain the desired detailed information in the reports, you can use different filters, categorization, and groupings. After analyzing the obtained data thoroughly, one can determine which tasks are a burden and consume most of their team’s time. All of this is in order to improve project delivery by prioritizing the team’s activities better. Why? Because accurate decisions are (and have to be!) data-driven  - simply because the decisions made on the basis of assumptions and predictions do not prove out well.

So generally speaking, data is the key to the success of every project - and that’s difficult to argue. However, it often happens to be scattered across different databases and software. When the relevant data is not connected to the tool where the action takes place, people lose time searching for information - and they are more likely to make mistakes. That’s where Elements Connect comes in. With the help of this app, you can bring your external data inside Jira custom fields and make important information available (in context!) to Jira users. 

Elements Connect is, for a reason, called the most powerful connector for Jira. It allows you to populate Jira custom fields with data from any source - from SQL databases to popular cloud services or your LDAP. In short, with Elements Connect, you can display only the relevant information based on the previous selection, e.g.: a text field that gets the data from an external database about prices or a field that displays info about clients and contracts from an external CRM system. Together with Elements Connect, Worklogs should ensure that relevant data is in the hands of the people who need it and when they need it. And all of this to make it easier for the managers to check on what the entire team is up to and how much time it takes them.

Why integrate at all

The need for application integration results from the need to move data between applications smoothly.  It is as simple as that! Application integration is generally about transferring data in a scheduled, ongoing way. It helps to maintain, manage, and keep the applications up to date while reducing the risk of data duplication and redundancy. When you create the so-called application integration network, you allow applications to "communicate with each other” - regardless of the fact if they were originally intended to communicate with each other or not. Thus, you prevent the occurrence of human error and the need for manual intervention. Thanks to it, business and work processes can be done more effectively and efficiently.

The story of integration

We have realized how crucial application integration is quite recently. One of our clients asked why fields created by Elements Connect are always showing "no value" in the Worklogs table and export  - even though they have the value displayed inside issues. Clients’ inquiries always alert us and we try to investigate the issue thoroughly in order to respond quickly.  

At that point, one could wonder what Worklogs – Time Tracking and Reports and Elements Connect have in common. Well, it is true that these two apps deal in two different areas, such as time-tracking reports and external data. However, these areas complement each other from time to time - for the reports created in Worklogs to be more complex and more robust. 

After investigation, we found out that what the client used was a custom data type, not yet supported by us. Since the solution to the problem was vital to our client, we immediately started working on it. Luckily, our existing code allowed us to add support for these fields without too much effort. That’s exactly how we like it! We quickly tested and released the first batch of adjustments.

Finding the right solution so quickly seemed too good to be true? Well, it was. It turned out that we encountered another problem, a more complicated one. As the client has been using Elements Connect for a very long time, they had legacy fields added from the old version of the plugin. And as before any upgrade, we had to be aware of the order in which we needed to perform the upgrade steps. Besides, it was crucial to note potential issues and risks that could occur within the upgrade process. That’s why it took us a while to recreate their environment, add a fix, test it and release another adjustment.

Finally, our efforts paid off and the effects were satisfying to all the interested parties. In the end, the customer reported that everything is working great and we now have full support for the plugin. From that moment on, all Worklogs - Time Tracking and Reports users can enjoy seamless integration with Elements Connect. No additional configuration is required. And what’s the most important - if you have any fields from Elements Connect, they will be discovered and visible in Worklogs. This functionality will work with Cloud, Server and Data Center versions.