An update on Jira Service Management customer feedback – July 2022

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28 September 2022: Thanks for your interest in helping us shape and improve Jira Service Management. There's a new Update on Jira Service Management customer feedback – September 2022 now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored.

Hi! I’m Shihab 👋🏽 Many, many years ago I was the first product manager working on what today is Jira Service Management.

In the early days, we listened and learned from our customers and landed on the idea that if we could connect non-technical requesters to those that fulfilled requests, we could open up the Jira workflow platform to a whole new category of use cases. Today, we have a product that’s being used by over 40,000 customers and recognised as a visionary in the service management space.

But we’re not done!

We’ve been working hard to continuously improve Jira Service Management Cloud. The feedback you provide is essential in helping us identify opportunities to better our products – from reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, or commenting in the Community – we’ve been listening.

In this post, I’ll touch upon some of the most common areas of feedback we’ve received and share an update on what we’ve shipped recently to address them. I’ll also provide some insights into the next steps we’re taking to make Jira Service Management Cloud even better.

Usability and efficiency

”Forms are pretty intuitive and I have found I am able to do almost everything I need to relatively easily.”

We hear you loud and clear when you say you want us to make Jira Service Management easier to use or more intuitive. In addition to investing in features that improve the usability of Jira Service Management, we also are continuously working to improve our in-product help as well as our guides and documentation.

WHAT WE’VE SHIPPED

• We’ve released hundreds of new templates with the new Forms functionality. You may already be familiar with our project templates that empower teams from IT to HR to legal to set up a service desk quickly. Forms take that to the next level, where we have hundreds of form templates from event run sheets to exit interviews to travel expense claims. Learn more about Forms here.
  
  
  
  
  

• We’ve released four new form automation components last month to provide you with even more flexibility when building automation around forms:
  
  
  
  You can find these new automation components in your instance by visiting Project Settings > Automation > Create rule. Check out this video for everything you need to know to get started building your new automation rules.
  
  

• Many service desks operate strictly via e-email with their customers and requiring them to log in just to view attachments can be a jarring experience. In response to significant customer demand, you can now configure how your customers access attachments in email notifications, allowing your customers to download attachments directly from email notifications, without logging in, making the support process smoother than ever. Learn more about how to enable login-less attachments for your project.

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

• To ensure you can perform core tasks effectively and efficiently, we’re raising the bar on the look and feel and working on features that will contribute to a cleaner overall experience with the portal, issue view, and configuration.
  
  

• We will be working on improvements to our guides and documentation for Insight. We will also be renaming Insight to Asset & Configuration Management (or Assets for short) to make its purpose clearer.
  
  

• We're also improving the experience of configuring users, fields, workflows, and request types and will share updates in the Community and on our Cloud Roadmap as our plans move from discovery to delivery.

Set up, configuration and administration

”The customer permissions also need to be more fine-grained. It seems like we can give them access to everything or nothing - and there should be a middle ground.”

Another key initiative based on your feedback is improving admin and customer management capabilities. We’re shipping features to help you fine-tune access, notifications, visibility, and more across our products.

WHAT WE SHIPPED

• Service catalogs should be easy to configure. We have recently released an intuitive request-type configuration experience with a drag-and-drop interface that is 100% backwards compatible for all our users.
  
  
  
  

• Without visibility across different products for a single user, it’s hard to get a full picture of their access. New capabilities for organisation-level user and group administration mean that you can now have a single location to manage user access across Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. And we’re one step closer to centralising all user access information, not just for our core products. For more detail on how we’ve simplified admin screens, check out this article.
  
  
  
  

• The ability to customise the frequency and content of notifications that end-users receive is really important as they rely on these to track their requests and approvals. We added capabilities to help with the reduction of email notification failures in addition to features that allow admins to customise the content of the email and the sender name. We have also made it easier for end-users to access attachments of an email.

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

• We know that setting up fields can be challenging, given the complexity of screens. We will soon allow Jira admins to access all fields on their entire instance on the right hand panel of a request type. No more navigating to other pages to find the field you want.
  
  

• We’ve considered the primary use cases for managing customer accounts and are focused on delivering features that make them work. This includes SSO for External Customers, allowing organisations to connect third-party user directories for accessing their Jira Service Management Help Centre, domain-based sign-up for internal customers, and domain restricted sign-up for external customers. Keep up to date with progress in our best practise vision post.
  
  

• More granular admin roles, centralizing permissions, and simplifying administration will be a major priority for the team moving forward. You can find out more about our plans for granular admin roles and centralized permissions view via our Cloud Roadmap for Administration and Community articles.
  
  

• Additional failure tracking and customization options for customer emails. You can learn more about our plans to improve notifications on our Cloud roadmap. We are also working on further improvements to customer management through email domain organization group filtering and allowing groups to be used for permissions and sharing. Learn more about choosing the right approach to customer management here.
  
  

• We’ve recently formed a team to focus on a problem area of early service desk configuration so we can help admins experience value from the product as soon as possible and have already identified specific actions to take based on customer research.

Tracking, reporting and representing work

"It would be nice to have the ability to create more specific reports, without having to create a JQL query. This would allow some of the less tech-savvy users to really utilize the filters feature without having to ask for help.”

We’ve heard from customers with advanced data and reporting needs that want the ability to create custom reports with data from Atlassian and third-party products. Our team has been working on integrating enhanced analytics and visualization capabilities into our suite of products as well as building a data lake across the Atlassian platform.

WHAT WE’VE SHIPPED

• Atlassian Analytics is in an early access program where customers have access to product data from Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Insight and Opsgenie Alerts. We understand that data access can be a sensitive issue, so we've provided features that offer admins full control over access to data and dashboards.
  
  

• We’ve also made some performance improvements to our existing reports within Jira Service Management and Opsgenie.
  
  
  
  

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

• We’re launching Atlassian Analytics' Open Beta for Enterprise Cloud customers this quarter. As part of this offering, customers will have a range of out-of-the-box interactive dashboards; the ability to create custom reports to track capacity and efficiency with SQL or no-code visualization; and features that allow exporting data, sharing dashboards, and connecting to third-party data sources.

Using the Editor

“Dealing with complex tickets and it's no fun to work with unformatted text.”

We feel you. Text format should be the least of your worries. We have a handful of updates here to improve your experience.

WHAT WE’VE SHIPPED

• We’ve recently added a rich-text editor on the Portal request form and the ability to @mention users on the request form fields for Portal users in response to feedback on the request submission experience. Now a help-seeker is able to tag or mention relevant users on a request.
  
  
  
  

• While we’ve heard a mix of feedback from customers around re-sizing and manipulating images, adding and referencing attachments, and collaborating on Media, our recent focus has been on improving the performance, reliability, and scale of Media. We’ve made strong progress in increasing reliability when uploading a file, viewing a file on a page, and previewing. We can now support much larger Cloud instances and our focus on reducing Media’s bundle size contributes to a much faster experience.

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

• We’ll continue to improve reliability, performance and scale while shipping features related to manipulation, capture and collaboration on Media. There’s more detail in this blog post, and we’ll continue to provide regular updates in Community and on our Cloud Roadmap.

Navigation and search

“I am unable to perform customized search and the attributes available to get what I need is limited.”

Insight provides a huge amount of flexibility in how you can structure your assets and configuration items. However, we understand that in order to fully harness its benefits you need to be able to surface the assets you need quickly and easily.

WHAT WE’VE SHIPPED

• We recently launched a new Insight landing page with a rapid search capability allowing you to easily surface the object, object type, or object schema you are looking for. We also added a Recent objects view allowing you to return to objects you have been working with without the need to search.
  
  

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

• We will continue to explore adding new search features to Insight with a focus on advanced search using IQL (Insight Query Language), the ability to filter by assets linked with open requests, and the ability to save searches as filters. Stay up-to-date on how work is progressing on our Cloud Roadmap.

Technical performance

”I find the page loading quite frustrating. It loads a field, then it moves around as other components load - which makes it hard to set up a new issue quickly.”

We understand that when certain experiences within Jira Service Management are perceived as slow or unresponsive like queues and SLAs, this can be the result of asynchronous actions or significant load. We want to ensure a fast experience at scale for all teams.

WHAT WE’VE SHIPPED

• Recently we shipped changes to queues that allow teams and individuals to promote the content most valuable to them, saving time waiting for unwanted content to load. There’s more detail in this article.
  
  

• Furthermore, we're taking steps to reduce waste in Jira Service Management-centric experiences by focusing on queues and reducing the number of queues that are regularly polling for updates when not required by the user, optimizing SLAs to reduce processing overhead, and partnering with Jira Platform in the extraction of the Issue Service.
  
  

• We have fundamentally reworked memory consumption in Insight to support up to 1 million objects without compromising performance.

WHAT’S COMING NEXT

• We have a clearer picture of how the Jira UI is impacted by the weight of the application and that this may result in slow page load or experiences for some customers. Teams are working to optimize load experience and improve responsiveness, especially for those with lower spec computers or browsers.
  
  

• Lastly, there is a general demand for the ability to support more Agents in Jira Service Management Cloud. We know that the current limit in the Cloud of 5k may be preventing some customers from migrating to Cloud. We currently offer an Early Access Program for organizations with 5k - 10k Agents and have developed a technical assessment process for validating organizations who are good candidates for the program. We’ll continue to share our progress here in Community and on our Cloud Roadmap.

Integrations and extensibility

”Love the integration with our JIRA scrum tools; it's very easy to take service items and associate them with new bugs and features for the dev team and for them to refer back to the service tickets that warranted the scrum tickets.”

One thing we love about Jira Service Management is its flexibility and extensibility with apps and integrations to cater to unique use cases. However, we also understand that some of you would like for us to provide more features natively and so we’re continuing to add new features to best meet the evolving needs of our customers while also working to improve the app experience.

WHAT WE’VE SHIPPED

• To make knowledge creation and management seamless for your team, we’ve released a native knowledge base in Jira Service Management that is powered by Confluence. This includes the ability to create, edit and publish knowledge articles natively in Jira Service Management while leveraging Confluence’s rich editor capabilities and better rendering of articles in the help center. Learn how to set up your knowledge base with Confluence or check out some of our templates for getting started on the knowledge base.
  
  

• In addition to the recently released FREE price point for 1-10 users on Atlassian Marketplace, we’ve launched new pricing tiers and also reduced the price multiple from $.05 to $.01, so partners can get more granular with pricing for larger companies. We hope these updates help you better customize your Atlassian products according to your needs. To find out which apps offer a FREE version for teams of up to 10 users (we’re up to almost 900 Cloud apps offering this), visit the Atlassian Marketplace.

WHAT’S NEXT

• We know the ability to use Forge to build apps for Jira Service Management has been highly requested by Forge users, and this work fits with our larger strategy of enabling Forge across Atlassian products. Get Started with Forge for Jira Service Management provides more detail on what’s new, what you can build, and a demo to help get you started. If you want to hear more about what else is in the works for Forge, we invite you to watch the Forge roadmap for developers.

So, once again, thank you all for your feedback - we truly take it to heart and it helps us shape and improve Jira Service Management and other Atlassian products for all teams. 

When making decisions about what to prioritize, we combine your feedback and suggestions with insights from our support teams, product analytics, research findings, and more. Coupled with our longer-term product and platform vision, it contributes to how we determine what to implement and its priority order.

There are plenty of exciting improvements to come! We’ll continue to share the work that’s happening with more Community articles like this and in the meantime, you can also stay across what we have planned for Jira Service Management on our Cloud Roadmap.

Shihab
Head of Product, Jira Service Management

[Dave Mathijs]

Wow, that's an extensive post, thanks for sharing @shihab!

[Muhammad Fahad]

Hi @shihab ,

Thanks for sharing the details about what has been shipped and what's coming next soon for the Jira Service Management (JSM) product. New enhancements launched so far are quite exciting.

I understand that Atlassian Analytics Open Beta will be launched for Enterprise Cloud customers this quarter. Is there a plan to make this available for premium customers soon?

[Jason D_Cruz]

Hi @Muhammad Fahad , I'm Jason, one of the product managers on Shihab's team, and looking after all things analytics and reporting in JSM. The majority of interest that we saw during the initial scoping for Atlassian Analytics was from Cloud Enterprise customers looking to combine data across Atlassian products. 

As we collect feedback from our EAP and Open Beta we are seeing a lot of interest from customers in other editions. Our priority is gathering more feedback from Cloud Enterprise use cases and adding more products to the data lake, however, we are scoping how we introduce these features to our other editions which is expected to take atleast another six months.

We'd would love to hear feedback about use cases on how you’d use Atlassian Analytics. Note that you'd be currently eligible for Atlassian Analytics even if you have a Jira Software enterprise license and JSM Premium.

[Kyle W_]

When are you all going to resolve this issue for the feature that just about everyone dislikes?

JRACLOUD-72429 - Option to Disable Smart Links For Non-Atlassian Products in ADF editor.

[Paul Madison]

Does the "Copy Form" automation allow you to copy forms across projects?

[Haddon Fisher]

Love the engagement.

- Can +1 the ask for "Atlassian Analytics" to extend beyond Enterprise; everyone needs this. Happy to show you the plethora of google sheets based reporting we have to do right now.

- Would also +1 the sentiment that it's a little frustrating to see so much effort being put into new shiny toys while we still don't have some very basic, foundational things we've been asking for. 

[Scott Koorey]

Some great updates here.

Regarding integration of Confluence with JSM, I recently noticed that Confluence articles are finally being displayed in our JSM knowledgebase with the correct layout and formatting that we see in native Confluence. This is a much-appreciated development.

However, for Confluence articles that are longer than a single page/screen, they are now being rendered in a frame inside the browser page, with a separate scroll bar to move down to read more of the article. This is very unintuitive to navigate. Can this please be looked at? It should be possible to simply scroll down / page down the browser window to view more content.

[Peter Kemp]

@shihab that is all great but can you fix the absolutely terrible formatting of email coming into JSD? This is just a bare essentials requirement that you would think should work without an issue. Any email that comes in to JSD with HTML, tables, email signatures, images are not formatted properly. Within a service request you end up with many attachments (images from signatures) and having to scroll through pages and pages of comments consisting of mostly poor email formatting just to find the customer responses. It all makes for a very poor user experience so much so that our helpdesk don't want to use Jira. Other helpdesk systems we have tested don't have this issue.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-8105

[Josie Browning]

@shihab and @Jason D_Cruz just to clarify, there is no way to delete a published knowledge article page within the native JSM knowledge base? We will need to have a confluence licence holder on standby to go in and delete if a page is accidently published onto the help centre?

Also, @'ing / mentioning seems to be broken on transition screens so you cannot currently mention customers. When attempting to reply to customers in the 'reply to customer' comment box present the resolution screen- it just shows the users full account ID number when trying to mention.

[Simon H]

Hi, @Paul Madison I'm the product manager for forms, you asked:

Does the "Copy Form" automation allow you to copy forms across projects

Yes, you can copy a form between issues in different projects. This is useful if say you have a request to onboard a new team member, that starts in the HR project but when HR's work is complete they need IT or Facilities to action the request. Using this automation function you can copy the original form over to a new request in the IT or Facilities projects.

[philoye]

Hi @Kyle W_, 

When are you all going to resolve this issue for the feature that just about everyone dislikes? JRACLOUD-72429 - Option to Disable Smart Links For Non-Atlassian Products in ADF editor.

Sorry that the linking behaviour isn't working for you. A fix for that is in progress, you can follow along on ticket for updates. Also, on that ticket, there are details for how you can get a sneak peak and a way to provide feedback directly to the team.

[shihab]

Thanks again for your feedback and support!

We're always listening and we do see the feature requests and bug reports that come in. While we won't have immediate solutions to all the asks, I want to thank you again for raising it on our radar.

I've tagged my team internally so the most appropriate product lead can connect and respond directly to your questions.

[andrew.pass]

Great article and great to see some awesome stuff coming up!

We'd also love to use the data lake and analytics, we currently use EazyBI so have plenty of use cases that we'd like to see or talk through, including devOps metrics from tools such a BB Cloud or Jenkins.

Keep up the amazing work!

[Dan W]

@Simon Herd ,  is the ability to copy forms across projects still rolling out.  In our instance we can only use the copy forms component in single project automations, it isn't available for global automations.

[Joseph]

@Josie Browning Hi, I'm Joe, PM for knowledge base experience in JSM.
All JSM users should be able to delete the pages that they publish, but at the moment there is a bug and we are looking into it. 

Hi @Scott Koorey , I understand that the separate scrollbar is unintuitive. We will be fixing the 'separate scrollbar' issue very soon. 

[Scott Koorey]

Thanks @Joseph , it's great to hear that a fix for the separate scrollbar issue is being working on.

I have another question about the way Confluence content renders in JSM - my customers sometimes want to print out knowledgebase articles. However, an article that is longer than a single page in length appears to be treated like an image rather than a webpage - as a result, the print job will cut off exactly at the end of a page length, which often means that the page-break cut is through the middle of a line of text, or might cut an image in half.

Could you also look at whether printing of these pages can be handled like webpages or documents, rather than images?

[Joseph]

@Scott Koorey I will look into this. Please follow this ticket to get updates regarding this feature.

[Haddon Fisher]

One other question: any update on Insights\Asset Management integrations for Cloud?

Putting aside for a moment that this new nice-to-have feature is sapping development energy from higher priority, more fundamental, and ultimately more needed work...it's got some interesting potential. However it's still minimally viable and not really ready for prime-time if we need to import data manually.

[Mandeep Singh]

@Haddon Fisher Yes, we are actively working towards a solution to enable Insight integrations (on cloud).

As a first step, we are planning to make the import APIs available on Forge in order to allow integrations for Insight Cloud to be built and distributed via Marketplace. From there we are also planning to build a number of integrations ourselves. 

You can follow along on ticket for updates. 

[Sławek Mikuła]

Badly needed i18n for Service Desk Widget and ability to select language via JS parameter and attach custom data (metadata) to widgets that is included into the issue reported to Service Desk (e.g. customer name, instance type etc). I18n for widget is a real showstopper for non english customers.

[Christopher Skoropada _Appsvio_]

Good to see how the JSD JSM looks today, compared to version 0.9.6 :) Congrats @shihab

[Nicholas Marsden]

@Joseph It would be nice to allow templates to be used when creating Knowledge Base articles. Having the capability in Confluence, but not in the knowledge base is hard to accept, especially since its more important that KB articles that are customer facing look professional.

[Joseph]

Hi @Nicholas Marsden,

ITSM templates are now available in the knowledge base. 👍