The most interesting case in Enterprise

[Yevhen Rohovets]

Hello community

I think it would be interesting to see various successful and unsuccessful cases on introducing and configuring Atlassian products in an Enterprise company.
Tell us about your most memorable cases?

As for me:

Bank, use Core, Software, Confluence, Service Desk. Setting up automation between products was necessary to build a support service and organize the work of all departments of the bank. A lot of scripts, a little custom dev and a lot of bureaucracy)

[Dastin_Kuwałek__SoftwarePlant_]

I have some memories from which I have learned :)

1. Migrating Jira from Cloud to Server.

This was my first commercial project for a customer who had a growing user base and wanted to have the company data under full control. Admins from the customer company had attempted a migration with the use of 3rd party add-ons available on the marketplace but they did not perform a migration of every detail. Failure of customer Jira admins created an opportunity and a need to hire someone who deals with Jira and Atlassian products on a daily basis.  

When I have decided to challenge myself with this project, I had more than 2 years of experience in:

 - developing functionalities which leveraged Jira API and were part of BigPicture Jira app

 - creating Workflow schemes, Issue type schemes, and every available Jira administration configuration via both Jira user interface and Jira API 

 - installing, upgrading, backing up and restoring Jira instances on Jira server

 - administering, backing up, configuring and restoring Jira Cloud instances (back then, Jira cloud looked and worked exactly like current server Jira 7 so those were the days when mastering Jira Server helped me a lot in mastering Jira Cloud) 

The migration itself went smoothly because I have practiced it many many times. 

Mastering the procedure before the migration itself helped me during the project execution as the project team consisted of me and my colleague which was responsible only for executing Linux commands on the terminal. Practically I was the "manager" of this project and the Jira expert while my colleague was everything-that's-technical guy =)

One of the mistakes which I have made is that I did not check the supported platforms page for Jira 7. The customer had a Microsoft SQL server database which was not supported at that time. Thankfully, database admin working for the customer did check this compatibility and pointed it out. It was an embarassing experience which I will never forget. In the end, the memory of that embarrassment always reminds me of checking infrastructure compatibility =)  

Another mistake was a hiccup which happened during the certificate configuration. My colleague has problems with a proper configuration of the cert and in the end, the https was scrapped to finish the project and unlock the Jira to company use.

2. One of my enterprise projects was to migrate the Help desk processes from an external tool to Jira Service Desk.

Before the Jira Service Desk project, I had to upgrade Jira from 6.x to 7.x and configure HTTPS for Jira. The https part was quite interesting as I have never done such things before :) Hours of learning about different formats of certificates and hundreds of restarts of Jira to check if the certificate is finally working.

The migration to Jira Service Desk was supervised by the head of Helpdesk and I have moved to the customer's office to facilitate the configuration and tests.

The project involved writing numerous scripts in Script Runner for Jira server which responded to Help desk tickets being opened, reopened or handed to the second line of support.

Automated closure of tickets after inactivity of the Reporter or for tickets which have been resolved for an x amount of days was another category if implemented scripts.

Thankfully, I did not experience much of bureaucracy because I was cooperating with the head of Help desk department and one of the consultants who was simplifying the bureaucracy so I could focus on the Jira Servi Desk part.

Funny thing is that just as in the case of the previous project of migrating Jira from Cloud to Server, a hiccup was connected to a publicly available address for the Jira Service Desk portal! There was a miscommunication and instead of configuring the https address for the Service Desk portal, the admin configured an HTTP address. So the same day that the Service Desk portal was announced to be available for the whole company, there was another announcement that the address is available under HTTP rather than https.

Many moments during which I have learned the value of:

 - testing on a staging environment before implementing the same on the production environment

 - preparing written procedures on the staging environment before stepping into the configuration of production instances

 - configuring test environments and making sure that business side approves the changes

 - writing scripts in a way that they inform the user/admin about errors