Heads up! New integration points between Jira and Confluence cloud products

[Leo B]

Hi all! 👋

My name is Leo Balan and I'm a Product Manager at Atlassian based in Sydney. My team has been working on strengthening the integration between Jira and Confluence, as well as enhancing discoverability of Confluence within Jira. You may notice a new option in the Jira sidebar called "Pages" that'll link you straight to relevant Confluence templates, and if you are an existing Confluence user it will show links to pages in an attached space. We've also made it easier to bring your team into Confluence and for users to request access to Confluence. Want to learn more? Check out our blog here: https://wp.me/p8IoKK-axZ

Are you using Confluence and Jira together? At what points in your Jira workflow would Confluence pages come in handy? I'd love to hear more from you.

Cheers,

Leo

[Bastian Stehmann]

Hi @Leo B,

that's some great news, as we have often been asked by our customers for this feature. Do you have plans to bring the "Pages" option also to the server products?

Within the workflow, an integration while Requirements Engineering or while documentation would help, as we often do this in confluence and this is often related to an issue.

[Leo B]

Hi @Bastian Stehmann,

At this point, we don't have any plans to bring this feature to the server products.

Great feedback about the integration points. We do have the ability to link Confluence pages from Jira issues, and we are working on improving that for the new issue view as well. Once you've linked a page to an issue, you'll see that issue turn up at the top of the Confluence page.

Cheers,

Leo

[Bastian Stehmann]

Hi @Leo B,

thank you for your feedback. I know about linking confluence pages, but it is a big difference between "one click to create a page related to an issue" and "go to Confluence, create a page in the right space, go back to the issue in Jira and add the link (or add the link already in Confluence and then go back to Jira).

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Totally with you Bastian! :) But overall very nice improvement for the cloud products, maybe it will somehow be available with less features in 12-24 months for server. ;)

[Gary Pasquale]

Sounds good.

Maybe on issue creation. We like to refer our users to our support space in Confluence prior to them raising an issue (Where they may find the answer to their question). Having that option to be re-directed to Confluence may prevent them from raising an unnecessary issue.

Regards,

Gary

[Gary Pasquale]

Although we have the server versions also :)

[Leo B]

Hi @Gary Pasquale,

That's an interesting use case. I'm not sure if you already use Jira Service Desk but it has features that exactly meet that need, to surface knowledge base articles during issue creation.

Sounds like it might be useful to do something similar for Jira / Jira Software as well. :)

Thanks for the feedback!

Leo

[Karen Hayden]

I would really like to see the ability to link a Confluence page to a Version.  This seems like an easy to do.

Unfortunately I'm on server version, so please consider for server installs.

Thanks.

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

We would love to see this on server version too.

[LeKisha Boswell]

The new features are a great addition! I really like how how easy it's to navigate between products using the hamburger icon located in the application navigator.

[Steven Behnke]

For Jira server we have numerous custom plugins that create pages via custom Post-Functions or Issue Operations. These are specific templates that are designed for certain high-value business processes and use variables to suck in data from Jira issues and apply them to Confluence Pages.

I won't touch on the current use-cases, but rather I'll refer to a specific example from when I was an Atlassian Expert:

Our Sales process was driven entirely through Jira and Confluence:

1. A Jira issue was created (type Sales Lead).
2. As negotiations with the customer progressed, the Sales team would ask either Engineering or Support managers to weigh in, helping construct the right deliverables, which were a linked Jira type.
3. These deliverables were combined with the resources (employees) that would be working on that sale, lead, contract. Cost and time were applied on these linked deliverable items.
4. When the Sales Lead issue progressed far enough, the ability to 'Print' the issue became an option. When this operation was used, Jira would create a page under a specific Space/Index page where all the sales documents were located. Different types of sales leads were organized under different index pages.
5. This document was pure content, paragraphs, copy text, and the details from the individual deliverables were summarized in a typical table outlining the hours and cost of the job. The deliverables were also used to generate more content where the individual portions of the job were described and considered in detail, again lifting text fields and values from the tickets.
6. The document would be marked up using page comments and inline comments, allowing a natural Confluence experience from this point out.
7. When the document was finalized, we used the PDF Customization abilities to heavily adjust the look and feel of the PDF -- Cover page, contact info in the header/footer, branded with logos and water marks.

I no longer work as an Expert and now use these same abilities to construct test documents or generate emails to external clients. 

Any sort of built-in ability for Jira to perform these functions would, of course, be excellent. Alas, I am a Server customer as well, so I can't see how this works in Cloud.

[Leo B]

Hi @Steven Behnke,

Thanks for the detailed account!

It's quite interesting to hear a use case like this where at some point you want to transition from having info in a Jira issue to a Confluence page. How do you judge the right time to do this, and what does Confluence give you over Jira at this point that prompts the move?

The ability to auto-generate a page and pre-fill content from a Jira issue definitely sounds like a worthwhile feature to explore, I'll take that onboard.

Cheers,

Leo

[Steven Behnke]

Howdy.

Confluence Blueprints plugin module suites the need sometimes, but specifically since the process was initiated from inside Jira, it seemed natural to want to trigger the page creation from Jira. 

The issue operation was available when the ticket was in particular statuses. Specifically, after engineering/support review and sign off, we were ready to start collaborating on the document. It was fairly open ended -- We wanted the option to push pages to Confluence at that point, but weren't enforcing it. Create the page when we need to start wrapping up the lead and sending the documentation to the customer.

The issue with using Jira for the entire process is that we were used to marking up Word documents with feedback and sharing them around. Obviously, this sucks. So we wanted to take advantage of collaborative editing, inline comments, the whole shebang -- Features that are not possible in Jira.

Further, the template was created with a fair amount of boilerplate text -- We went through efforts once it was created in Confluence to personalize the entire statement of work for the specific customer and job. Confluence seemed like a natural choice for this.

For the record, customers have been asking for 'auto generate a page and pre fill content with jira issue details' for years, possibly a decade. There's a huge gap that Atlassian should consider taking on, otherwise the only people who provide the value are consultants and administrators like me (not very common) or via plugins that charge an arm, leg, and my first three children.

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

Seconding that, "auto generate a page and pre fill content with jira issue details" is a huge demand - would be awesome to have this kind of Jira-Confluence integration out of the box!

[Greg Johnson]

Thirding that - generating Confluence pages from Jira both filled with Jira-data and other boilerplate content would be fantastic!

[Steven Behnke]

Seems like you have some interested customers @Leo B. :)

[Greg Johnson]

Great!  I feel silly to be asking, but it comes up every time - why is Server not given equal priority as Cloud?  Why not develop them in parallel?  You'd avoid a lot of us who have been using Atlassian products for almost a decade (long before Hosted/Cloud/whatever) from having to ask the question :-)

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

@Greg Johnson I'd see - less attention more stable :p .

But the new JIRA Software does have the Cloud kinda look and feel. I just be more happy if Server gets its project archival features like in data centre and this new super integration between ;

jira server and confluence server

jira cloud and confluence server

jira server and confluence cloud

:p - asking for too much i guess.

[Steven Behnke]

Server gets its project archival features like in data centre

^^ Sounds like they're set on making this a DC only feature for some reason

[Kathy Hart]

I am surprised that the Confluence Roadmap bars cannot be linked to Jira Issues at the Epic or Task level. This would be a great improvement. As it is, the Roadmap is much too manual to be of any use to me. 

We have started using Confluence to keep notes, meeting notes, decision logs etc. about Jira Projects and Epics and integration of the roadmap would be invaluable if it had the functionality I've suggested above. 

[Manon Soubies-Camy]

I agree with @Kathy Hart, the roadmap macro is often a disappointment when users realise it can't be connected to Jira. Unfortunately Atlassian lately stated here: 

While this suggestion has gathered significant interest, we're unable to implement all of the excellent suggestions you make. We appreciate the benefits of such requests, but don't plan to work on this for the foreseeable future.

The corresponding Cloud suggestion still is "Need verification" so hopefully it will at least be implemented in Confluence Cloud!

[miikhy]

Definitely a good integration, too bad for Server users!

Would be a killer to have a way to define templates embedding fields from jira issue. Let me explain: I'd love, as a Scrum Master, to have a Story template in Confluence which could be generated from a Jira issue, bringing in Confluence some of the fields! I've done that a lot with addons in the past, native would be a killer. Could be great to document bugs as well for instance. The template would be taking placeholders for the fields and would be generated from the issue directly! I might be dreaming but hey... :p

Cheers

[Chris Johnston]

This kind of integration needs to be done for server version too.

Additionally -- you need to do a similar linkage for sprint boards to the release pages in jira.

A jira product release has documentation, release notes, etc.  All of those are best done in confluence and linked directly on the release page within Jira so it's easy for people to navigate between them.

[Anders Malmberg]

Hi @Leo B

Sounds good, but there is an obstacle :( we have been using Confluence for several years and started to implement Jira this spring. Unfortunately, the applications are on two different instances; Jira on https://mycompany.atlassian.net and Confluence on https://mycompanywiki.atlassian.net as we did not know about the consequences when we started up.

Any plans to support this in the nearest future?