There are several reasons why I love Atlassian products, but the biggest one is their flexibility. With Jira Software, in particular, your imagination is the only limit. It's not just a tool for casual project management – it can be used for so much more.
Another reason I love Jira is that my company already has a paid license for it, plus everyone is familiar with the product and how it works. That's why I decided to try and build a document management system with built-in workflow and control using Jira Software.
Here are some reasons why Jira is perfect for this:
- Each Jira issue can represent a single document.
- Workflows, user roles, validators, and automations can help create and sign documents without missing any important steps or information.
- Issue types and fields (both regular and custom) can provide additional information for each item, such as company name, due date, signee person, contract type, and more.
- Issue status and resolution can clearly tell at which state the document is, and if you add CRON automation based on due date or other date related fields, you can update it and then just fire a filter results with alerts to responsible person.
- Issue linking can group or show relationships between several documents.
- JQL allows for advanced searches, such as "list all signed external contracts for company ABC before Jan 2022."
- Security level project settings can hide sensitive information from unauthorized users.
- Documents can be linked to other projects, tasks, companies, JSM organizations, and more.
However, the only problem is storing the documents themselves. We can't store them as attachments in Jira because they can't be filtered in JQL, which is necessary for audits. Additionally, some exports only list picture attachments as "images" in HTML or RSS formats, without showing other attachment types like PDF or DOC. Doc exports show all attachments but only their names, not URLs. XLS exports are a nightmare to parse.
Reason why attachments are important: external audits wont have access to Jira cloud instance, they usually ask us 'zip em all, give us a excel table with file names and what is inside'
I. To address this, I considered using Dropbox or Google Drive and creating a custom field for the document URL. However, this would require too much manual work and could lead to human errors when linking different versions of the same document.
II. I've also considered email ticketing as a solution. Basically, you would BCC everything and include the document UID/name in the title or description. Then, using automation, you could use REGEXP to search for tickets with similar document UIDs (in a custom field). If you find a match, you could merge attachments and delete the newly created ticket. Otherwise, you could keep the created ticket in the "Incoming" folder for the responsible person to handle. However, I haven't been able to find a way to make this check and merge happen.
III. I also looked for SaaS solutions, but most of them are absurdly expensive, and they focus on creating new documents within their own ecosystems rather than storing incoming contracts. They also lack the agility to create custom fields, labels, and other features that can be easily attached to Jira issue screens.
IV. Confluence - nope. Pages lack fields, no strict workflows, automation at full power, no JQL and even more headache with attachments export.
Have you faced a similar issue? Do you have any ideas on how to solve this attachment problem?
