How to sync the Out of Office status from Outlook into Jira

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Thanks to the latest release of Out of Office Assistant for Jira Cloud, it’s finally possible to connect Outlook to Jira and maintain your Out of Office status from your email client!

This means that you can automatically trigger task and approval delegation, or simply make sure that everybody who interacts with you in Jira knows that you are out of office.

How does it work

1. When a user connects the integration of Outlook and Out of Office for Jira, auto replies are synced

2. What the app takes from the automatic replies are only the time periods – not the actual messages.

3. This means that whenever auto replies are enabled, there will be an active OoO rule in Jira.

4. If the user doesn’t do anything else than just connect Outlook, the rule will be a simple default.

5. If in need of anything fancier (or more helpful), users can connect more templates. It’s possible to connect as many as you like, just as long as they fire for different sets of issues.

6. Oh, I forgot! Templates are just like rules, but without dates. They’re just a different table in our database. You don’t need to understand if it sounds technical, but if you do, here’s a good resource.

And for the full documentation, visit this article!

Major Use Cases for integrating Outlook absences into Jira

But let’s go into the real details of how to extract value out of this integration. I’m going to look into 3 different scenarios: a company that triages customer requests manually; a large JSM team handling dozens of requests daily with automatic assignments; and a corporate Enterprise Service Management flow with collaborations across departments powered in JSM.

Use Case 1: Using automated absences for accurate triaging

Here’s a classic triaging practice: issues are assigned manually based on skillsets and knowledge. The person making that decision needs to know, on top of that, who can start ASAP… and who would only be able to focus on the issue in a couple of days at best.

There are two basic features at work in this use case:

• the issue context that displays availability

• the integration with Outlook ensuring accurate Out of Office status

Use Case 2: Fixing round robin assignments to skip absent agents

I’ve already written a community article about this use case. But I really like it because it’s so effective and hooks to what our customers love using.

So just a quick reminder. Automated assignments are a great collaboration tool, but they are hard to maintain: as soon as someone is sick or on vacation, the admin has to go in and remove the absent user from the group. That’s not great.

So instead of doing that maintenance, you can simply combine your rules in Automation for Jira with a simple OoO rule that unassigns customer requests during absences, and make sure that the maintenance job is automatically done through the Outlook dates. Eureka!

Your issue histories will look something like this:

Use Case 3: Ensuring speedy collaboration across departments with Enterprise Service Management

JSM is a convenient way for requesters to find their way through to expert across any department of a corporation. But there’s a huge issue with approval steps: they tend to be… forgotten. Particularly at times when the approvers have something more important to do, or are not in the office at all.

To ensure that ESM speeds up collaboration and services employees efficiently, I highly recommend appointing approval delegates.

It’s as easy as setting up a template with the details below:

[Stephen_Lugton]

Nice article, thanks @Jaime Capitel _resolution_ 

[Jaime Capitel _resolution_]

Thanks @Stephen_Lugton! Let me know if you test it out