Q&A round-up: March 26 AMA with Steen Andersson

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On March 26th 2020, many of you tossed curly questions at our Head of Jira Cloud Platform, Steen Andersson, during the Ask Me Anything (AMA). Well done! We love seeing the bright personalities of our Community members reaching out and connecting. Bravo!

Here’s a round-up of the top questions:

Q. Joan_Melendez: “I have one for you!  In response to Covid19 we created HospitalPrepare.org.  Hospitals not only have to find supplies... but they'll need to find people.  We want to use Jira Service desk for this since we can easily link it to the website.  My question.  How can I create an easier selection for state or profession?  I don't want to use a freetext field and need users to be able to select multiple items.  Thanks!”

A. Steen: Hi @Joan_Melendez,

For the ‘state’ field, since you know all the options available I would suggest you use a ‘Select List (multiple choices)’ custom field type. This will mean the user can select multiple options from a defined set of values, in this case the state names, which you set up.

For the profession field, it depends if you also know the finite list of professions - you could use another ‘Select List (multiple choices)’ custom field type, perhaps with an ‘other’ option and another optional issue field that is free text for them to specify if they select other for profession?

If you go to {yourjirainstancename}.atlassian.net/secure/admin/ViewCustomFields.jspa  and click the ‘Create custom field’ button you can look through all the different custom field types and their descriptions in case the ‘Select List (multiple choices)’ field type doesn’t suit your needs.

Hope this helps - glad to hear that you are using our products for such an important job.

Q. Fortress_Halsey: I'd really love to be able to process Jira Service Desk approvals via the mobile app.  Found a ticket for it over in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-6093 Any chance this feature could come to the Jira mobile app soon?

A. Steen: Hi @Fortress_Halsey,

Good news! You can process approvals in the mobile apps. This feature has been available since earlier this year on both android and iOS mobile apps.

It seems the request you linked just hadn't been updated, I have notified the team to update it.

Enjoy approving requests on the go!

Q. carolyn_french: Since you suggested it... What’s next on the mobile apps roadmap?

Thanks!

A. Steen: Hi @carolyn_french,

We've got lots of great features in the works. What might be most exciting is that we'll be bringing customer favourites such as Reports and Dashboards to mobile!

The team is also working on:

• Enabling more ecosystem partners glances in the issue view

• Some exciting new integrations with OpsGenie for incident management

• Adding support for more custom fields 

• Performance improvements around viewing issue times

So stay tuned for the latest updates to the apps!

Q. Bryan_Bojorque: Hi @Steen Andersson,

Recently we just encountered issues with display data in the mobile, it looks like custom fields and add-on fields like portfolio is not supported or showing. 

Now these add-ons are essential to our instance we should be able to see these kinds of fields.

Is there a way to / management for mobile where we can choose what to show or what not to show?

A. Steen: Hi Bryan,

We currently support a majority of the custom field types available in Jira and are continually adding more with a vision to support all fields. If you email the team at jira-cloud-native@atlassian.com, with the custom field types you find are missing it will help them prioritise these field types amongst all the others that other users need. 

The team has also recently introduced add-on support for glances (add-ons that appear in the right hand side of the new issue view). Ecosystem partners are currently testing their glances to ensure they work as expected in the mobile apps and when they are ready, they are letting us know and we are enabling them for users. We have already enabled glances from the likes of tempo, issue checklist, better pdf exporter and AtlasCRM among others, with many more partners still testing and updating their glances. The team is looking into which plugin point we will support next in mobile so again I would suggest you get in contact with them to describe your use case.

Have a question you didn’t get to ask during the AMA? Ask it now, in the comments below!

Until next time, keep up the great work, and take care of each other.

Top photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

[M Amine]

Thank you @Hannah McKenzie .