We want to hear from you! How do you use Slack and Atlassian together?

[Mina Kwan]

Hi Everyone!

My name is Mina and I am on Atlassian’s Ecosystems Marketing team. Our team is focused on our technology partnerships and marketplace apps. One of Atlassian’s partners is Slack, who we have integrations on Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, and Trello with.

We’d love to hear from you. How are you currently using Slack and Atlassian together? What do you find most useful about the integration(s) you are using, and how has it improved your productivity? Specifically, we are looking for your help to answer some of the following questions: 

• If you are a developer, how has using Slack + Atlassian products enabled you to move faster and collaborate?
• If you are a project manager, how does using Slack + Jira help you stay up to date?
• What are best practices that you have utilized to using Slack + Atlassian?
• Do you work on a remote team? If so, how has using Slack + Atlassian helped you stay in sync with colleagues? 
• Has using Slack + Atlassian save you time? We’d love to hear about it
  
  

We’re hoping this discussion will give us insight into our customers who are using Slack and Atlassian together. Thank you in advance for your feedback!

[Kat Warner]

We still do not have things integrated as nicely as when we were using HipChat. A barrier for us is having time to read the fine print to make sure data is not going anywhere else if we add an integration. Some integrations pull data from Jira and pushes it to Slack via their own servers.

On my to-do list is finding an integration to raise tickets easily from Slack.

We currently have the Elevator Bot for Jira Service Desk giving the whole team visibility of service desk activity in the office and remotely.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Yeah, I agree we made in house app for repeat Hipchat integration func

https://github.com/gonchik/jira-slackit

Therefore I will be happy if Atlassian implement old Hipchat functionality in Official integration :)

[Luiz Silva]

The integration Jira Cloud for Slack is capable of creating issues from Slack with the slash command /jira create. 

On the other hand, our integration Jira Server for Slack is capable of creating dedicated channels from Jira in which you can discuss the issue and get updates.

Regarding data security:

• The official Atlassian Cloud integrations live in the same Atlassian infrastructure as Jira Cloud itself.
• The Server integrations connect directly with Slack, no intermediary in between, not even Atlassian.

Your data won't exposed to third parties in any case.

[Dan]

We have tried using the integration but have found that the jira updates "flood" the slack rooms with far too many messages to a point where they are ignored

[Luiz Silva]

Hey @Dan, 👋

I'm a developer who currently supports some of the integrations with Slack. I really appreciated you taking your time to give us this feedback, which certainly helps us a lot. If that's okay, I'd like to understand a little bit more about how we could improve.

For context, I'm aware in some of our apps the default notifications are way too loud and tackling this is definitely in our radar. Today, the configuration page allows users to select what they need, among some event types such as issue creation, comments, transitions. We also released JQL filtering recently, so you can have a fairly fine-grained control over what's sent into your channel.

Could you please briefly elaborate on where you faced friction here? Did you find the filtering features I mentioned? What are we missing for your use case?

Best regards.

[Ronald]

I have the same problem, even with filters on them.

Would it be possible to start an 'thread' if you get more notifycations on a single jira issue? that would make a huge difference.

[Nick Cron]

Hi @Ronald and Dan. 

 Nick here from Nextup.ai - the makers of Jira integration+ 

We introduced batch updates where you select the frequency of update (5 minutes, hourly, every 4 hours) back in March which sends you one update for every change made and significantly reduces channel and personal notification noise.

We are also releasing thread based updates in a week or so.  

If you are interested in a 3rd party integration you can try our free trial.  The solution is $0.75 per user after the trial of your team decides to move forward.

[Lucy Crawford]

I would love to be able to mirror the same filters we have for our board on our slack integration, so we can see what's been updated or added just to our board.

There's also a small bug, where user IDs instead of user names are pulling through into comments, so if someone is tagged in a comment, you can't see who it is without opening the ticket.  

I'd also really love it if once a ticket had been assigned, the original notification showed the assignee, although I get that this is pretty likely to be beyond the ability of this integration. 

[Sharon Helms]

We love the Atlassian-Slack integrations!

Here are some of the ways:

• It's been super helpful to be able to create new Jira issues directly in Slack. It saves time, prevents us from needing to tell others to open an issue, & lets them see that's how we get our work done.
• Some of our teams have separate private channels to receive notifications whenever a new issue is opened in either their Jira software or Jira Service Desk projects. Managers can easily see new issues as they come in. By using a separate channel, it doesn't become overwhelming or distract from discussions in other open channels.   
• Some channels receive notifications of certain new Confluence blog posts. That's helped us get important news in front of employees, and has increased comments & participation.
• It's been helpful to see snippets of Confluence pages and Jira issues that people mention in channels. We have many employees who are newer to Jira & Confluence, but are much more used to Slack. The integrations help provide a bridge to take them directly to issues/pages they need.

[Mina Kwan]

Thank you for the feedback @Sharon Helms ! This is very helpful to know.

[Rob Moore]

We utilize our Jira-Slack integration rather extensively, primarily as a tool to alert various teams/users of tickets that matter to them when they have been created/moved/updated.  The Slack messages often include the description or last comment. 

But with the recent GDPR changes for cloud, any @mentions that are used now appear as the accountid within Slack.  We recently found the jsonEncode property which took care of translating certain characters that were causing errors in the automation... is there any such thing for translating accountid's back into display names? Especially when embedded within comments?

For the team channels, no one knows who is actually being @mentioned as a result of this issue.  Same thing if multiple users are mentioned within a comment with personal channel Slack messages.  We are no longer gaining efficiency since we need to open each ticket to figure out the full context of a comment.  We may as well go back to just email notifications and drop the integration (Jira emails show the display name without issue).

[Trevor Thompson]

Hi Rob,

Which integration are you using exactly? The Official Jira for Slack integration should not have this issue. If you're using another marketplace solution, then I recommend reaching out to the developer of it, as the Atlassian platform has made some GDPR changes that will affect marketplace solutions.

Trevor

[Rob Moore]

We're using Automation for Jira by Code Barrel to send web hooks to Slack, which are triggered by various events which are not possible to do with the official Jira+Slack integration.  Apologies, realized after posting that this was specifically for Jira+Slack.  I happened upon the discussion while looking for a solution to the GDPR issue.  I have reached out to Code Barrel for a solution.

[Rob Moore]

FYI, Code Barrel is shipping the fix for this (comment.body.html) very soon.

[macintacos]

Nextup.ai has a Jira + Slack integration that is genuinely great to use and is getting better all the time. I'd recommend taking a look at what they're doing there to see how the integration between Jira and Slack could be achieved and iterated upon.

[Mina Kwan]

Thank you for the feedback, @macintacos ! 

[Monique vdB]

@macintacos are you affiliated with Netxup.ai? If so, please see our guidelines for vendors, specifically:

Identify yourself as a partner: Make sure the user is aware you are affiliated with a partner company... If you are mentioning your own products or services, make sure you include wording to make it clear that you are affiliated with the company providing those products or services.

[Nick Cron]

@macintacos - Nick here, a co-founder at Nextup.ai.  We appreciate you using our product and the support here.  

@Monique vdB - @macintacos is not affiliated with Nextup.ai.

[Mike Bowen]

I implemented the Slack - Jira Service Desk, Confluence and Ops-Genie plugin because:

• Everyone in our office uses Slack for everything and I have found that people are so accustomed to seeing the Slack pop-up on their desktop when something is updated on Confluence or when a Jira ticket is incoming that it is rare for stuff to be missed. 
• The Slack #jiraservicedesk channel or #jiraconfluence channel is a good way of seeing current and past links to updates / tickets all in one place without having to search. 
• It is efficient especially when folk are working hard on other programs or apps and don't have time to sit in Confluence or Jira Service Desk queues. 
• It allowed me to turn off annoying email notifications for Jira Service Desk, much to the delight of all our agents. 
• When Slack can make the most hardened, stubborn, lazy employees want to use Confluence or Jira Service Desk then you know the you are onto a good thing. :-) 

Thank you for a wonderful integration. 

Mike

[Mina Kwan]

Thank you for your feedback @Mike Bowen !

[Fernando]

I am setting up the integration for our new support desk. I posted a topic to the community, but I wonder if any of you have found a way to customize the fields that are used to post messages into slack? I want to hide assignee and priority from external users.