Announcing the open Beta of the new CSV Importer Tool for Jira Service Management

[#1]

Update: The CSV importer is now live (as of 22nd January 2025) and available to all customers using Jira Service Management. In order to initiate and complete an import, you must either be an Org Admin or a Product Admin for the Jira Service Management site.

Please refer to this support documentation to see how the import process works.

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Hi Community! I’m Anurag, a Product Manager posting on behalf of the Jira Service Management team.

I’m excited to announce that we’re making it easier to import data from various service desk tools into Jira Service Management. The new CSV Importer tool allows you to seamlessly bring in data from CSV files such as issues and users into Jira Service Management company-managed projects, mapping columns to existing issue fields, or creating new fields as needed. This enhancement aims to reduce friction and improve the onboarding experience by enabling users to import real data from other applications with ease.

When will it be available?

The CSV importer is now available to all customers.

How do I use the CSV Project Importer Tool?

To use the CSV Project Importer Tool, you can use one of two ways:

• Navigate to your Jira Service Management Project template gallery and look for the "Import Data" option.

• Navigate to System settings and look for the “External System Import” option

From there, you can follow the guided steps to upload and map your CSV file.

What are the benefits of using the CSV Project Importer Tool?

• Flexibility: Allows mapping of CSV columns to existing fields or creation of new fields.

• Efficiency: Reduces the time and effort required to import data from other tools.

How can I share my feedback?

You can ask questions and share feedback in a couple of ways:

• Comment or ask questions in this post.

• Email us at jsmgrowthfeedback@atlassian.com

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and making this tool even better with your input!

[Qasem O]

can importing CVS file without password?

[Stefan Tichelaar]

Is this similar to "normal" Jira or can we expect improvement in CSV import in "normal" Jira too?

[Noelí Fusco]

Hi! great news! How can i import a list of new clients for my JSM Project with this importer tool?

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Noelí Fusco You can import users into a JSM project with this tool as long as you have org admin permissions for that site.

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Stefan Tichelaar I didn't fully understand the question. Could you expand on it please? 

[Noelí Fusco]

@Anurag Datta Roy Great! yes im a Jira administrator. Is there some documentation about it to know all the required fields i need to create on the csv file to do the importation?  thanks

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Noelí Fusco You can refer to this document: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/prepare-a-csv-file-for-import/  

Please feel free to reach out if you face any challenges

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Qasem O I didn't quite understand the question. Could you please expand on it a bit? 

[Stefan Tichelaar]

@Anurag Datta RoyJira already supports CSV import on project and site level. We use it quite a lot actually as "poor man's" project template to start new engineering projects up quickly with a specific set of Epics, Stories and Tasks already setup.

This works, however the importer is not always very easy to use.

(I always wondered why tempalting projects is not supported by Jira without again another plugin we need to pay for)

Seeing your announcement about a "new" CSV importer for service management, I was wondering if this also improves and extends the already available CSV import functions of Jira. 

[Phill Fox]

Whilst it is great to see this feature reach open Beta I would like to see an update on the scenario of using a CSV to add new project data to an existing project. 

The documentation linked from here only talks about creating new projects from the data (which is usually a one-off activity) compared to the need to update a set of existing tickets/add new tickets to an existing project (which is an ongoing activity). 

To add more context to this request. 

Organisation A uses Jira (or JSM) to track activity. They work closely with Organisation B who use a different tool for their tracking. The only commonality between the two organisations is through the sharing of CSVs. Org A sends a CSV of data to Org B that do something and then return the CSV with updates. Org A should then be able to upload that CSV and have the tickets update that have the issue key and create new tickets for rows without an issue key. 

My reading of the documentation for the new CSV importer leads me to the conclusion that every CSV will create a new project. Please correct me if my interpretation is wrong. 

[Tracy Evearitt]

Are we still going to be able to continue to use the Old CSV import tool?  I believe the new import only allows importing to a new project, not an existing project?  I need to be able to create issues within an existing product and I have been doing this with the old CSV import tool.  I just want to ensure this functionality isn't going away.

[Rodney D_Souza]

This announcement is a bit confusing.  What is different here than what has been available for several years?

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Phill Fox Thank you for sharing this suggestion! Your interpretation is correct. At the moment, the importer only allows you to import issues into new projects. However, we are actively working on enabling the ability to import into existing projects as well.
While I am unable to share a time-frame just yet, we are hoping to make it available to all customers in the near future.  

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Tracy Evearitt No - it is not going away. You can continue to use the old tool.

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Stefan Tichelaar New capabilities  are shipping for the Jira importer as well very soon. Will request @Shruti Narayan to share more details 

[Anurag Datta Roy]

@Rodney D_Souza The new import tooling offers significant performance advantages and removes some of the issue rate limitations present on the previous tool. Would encourage you to test it out and share your feedback. 

[Matt Doar _Adaptavist_]

When I use the CSV importer, I almost never want it to create a new project. I'll do that, thank you, and set up the various schemes as I want them. And creating a new project on every import would be a disaster to clean up, if that is what is currently happening.

[Noelí Fusco]

Hi everyone! I have another question. If I want to upload a list of external clients and organizations to an existing project, can that also be done using this CSV importer? Because in this case, we would import them in different stages, because there are more than 5,000 external clients.

[Phill Fox]

@Anurag Datta Roy Thank you for the prompt reply. Could I suggest that pending the release of the functionality to update/add tickets to existing projects that some wording be added to the documentation page to highlight this and point anyone accessing the documentation to the right set of documentation. 

Something like

With the release of the new CSV importer we have focused on the Use Case of creating new projects from a CSV. We will release further functionality in the future to support adding new tickets to an existing project or updating existing tickets in a project. Until we release this functionality please continue to use the existing CSV importer documented at https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/import-data-from-a-csv-file/

Thanks

[Darryl Lee]

Hi @Anurag Datta Roy - as @Phill Fox and others have pointed out, it does seem odd to more seasoned Jira administrators that you would create a new CSV import tool that only allows you to import into new projects that can only be configured by Template. (And only 4 very generic templates at that! "Business project", "Service project", "Software project - Kanban", "Software project - Scrum")

While the ability to create new projects via CSV has been around forever, not a single Community leader we polled indicated they ever used that feature.

@Stefan Tichelaar makes an excellent case for using CSV import to pre-populate a project with a standard set of Epics/Stories/Tasks as a "project template". But I'm actually talking about setting up a new project.

There's so many good reasons why you'd want to set up a new project before importing data into it:

• You might need to have a specific custom (or SHARED) workflow/screen/field/permission/notification schemes
• You may also not want the entire company looking at tickets that are supposed to be restricted to a single group.

It's a much better user experience if you've got that all the workflows/screens/etc. before issues get added to a project, because everything will actually WORK once the tickets start showing up.

Based on the documentation, you cannot control this within the new CSV import tool.

In addition, best practice for Jira administration suggest using SHARED schemes for all of the above configurations. (Despite Atlassian's best efforts to make it harder to configure projects this way with all of the Suggested Templates that the project creation tools push at us.)

I understand that Atlassian has a desire to expand their footprint to non-engineering realms and to also enable self-service administration. You want to make it "EASY!™"

But experienced Jira admins know the pitfalls of having a Jira instance where there is no consistency. It can lead to duplicate work, duplicate data, and ultimately a bad experience for the user.

</soapbox>

[Stefan Tichelaar]

@Darryl Lee    Amen!

The CSV import is really just a means to an end for us to be able to populate a project already created by hand by jumping through all the project setup hoops. If we can also start a new project with the right setup, that would be so much better.

In principle. We need templateing as in being able to duplicate a "standard" project for engineering with a set of default tickets created. It should not require another plugin to achieve this...  

[Darryl Lee]

@Stefan Tichelaar Oh yeah, one of my teams was looking for something similar. Because we use Deviniti's Issue Templates for Jira I think we advised the team to coordinate with us to create tickets in their projects using that mechanism.

However, there was the problem where if there was a time gap between when we created the project and when they got to the creation of their "template" issues, somebody might accidentally create an issue first. (The other complication is that they had gotten used to their various Epics and Tasks always being created in the same order, so say, "Hardware Epic" was always PROJECT-1, "Software Epic" was always PROJECT-2, "Video Hardware" was always PROJECT-3, etc.)

I was thinking you might be able to set up a Manual Automation that could clone issues from your own TEMPLATE project, although trying to get them created "in order" would be tricky. And also...

• Create Automation To Clone Ticket To Another Project Based On User Input Value 
• Jira Cloud Automation - Clone Issue with fields and link 

@Trudy Claspill and @Ravi Sagar offered the answer/tutorials above, but I think there would still be a problem being able to Target project. Oh reading that first link's answers, @Luka Hummel - codefortynine suggested using their Deep Clone API. Which yeah, that'd be another thing to buy.

Hum.

[Darryl Lee]

Additionally @Stefan Tichelaar here's some good tutorials on the general mechanisms for cloning Epics+Children and Tasks/Stories+Subtasks:

• Clone Epic, Stories and Subtasks tree with Jira Automation
• Automation: How to clone tasks/stories along with their sub-tasks

Alas, they still require "hardcoding" the target Project.

[Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_]

@Darryl Lee @Stefan Tichelaar if you need to create the same set of issues all the time when you create a new project, you can use our Issue Templates Agent for Jira. We provide rest api and you can use it in automation in Send web request action. Here it's example how to do it: https://docs.appsvio.com/issue-templates-agent-for-jira/using-app/usage-in-automation/create-new-projects-with-issues You don't need to hardcoding the target Project.

[Stefan Tichelaar]

@Darryl Lee  & @Kate Pawlak _Appsvio_ Thank you for the suggestions and information. I will have a look