New form builder is rolling out to Jira Service Management Cloud customers

[#1]

In April of this year, we acquired ThinkTilt, the makers of the Marketplace form building app ProForma. Following a lot of integration work, we’re excited to announce that we’re rolling out a new no-code/low-code dynamic form builder for Jira Service Management.

Starting December 10, 2021, this new form builder began rolling out across all editions of Jira Service Management Cloud.

The new forms experience for Jira Service Management

Forms for Jira Service Management is a no-code/low-code form builder that allows teams to create intuitive, user-friendly forms using a Confluence-style interface with dynamic fields, rich formatting, tables, and more.

Not only are forms intuitive to create, but adding them to your Jira Service Management portal makes it simpler for customers to share data. Your new forms are easy to read and easy to fill out.

Customers tell us that forms help them cut down on back and forth between agents and customers - leading to a better (and faster) experience for everyone. Forms guide customers to share information your agents need right there on the request, not in long comment chains or across multiple tools and mediums.

You can learn more about the latest features, including forms, in this interactive Jira Service Management demo.

Who has access to the new forms features?

Jira Service Management Cloud customers across all editions will have access to the new form builder.

Only Project Admins can see this form builder. Agents and customers see forms in queues and portals, but they aren’t able to edit or update the form design.

When will the new form builder be available?

The new form builder started rolling out to Jira Service Management Cloud customers on December 10, 2021. We expect to complete the rollout to Jira Service Management Cloud customers in mid-January. This does not include existing ProForma app users, but more on that below.

The rollout process is random, so we’re not able to say when an instance will receive forms, but do keep an eye on your Project Settings page. Your Project Admins will find the new no-code/low-code form features under Project Settings > Forms.

Already have ProForma installed?

No worries! ProForma users can continue using the Marketplace version of the app without any interruption. Please see the FAQ below for more details on migration to the new experience.

How are customers using forms with Jira Service Management?

We’ve seen IT, HR, Marketing, Facilities, Legal, and other teams build and use forms in their service portals.

Some example forms and workflows include:

• Service requests

• Change, incident, and problem management

• New employee onboarding and recruiting

• Fixing broken equipment, Print requests

• Bug triage and internal team bug checklists

We’ll highlight more forms use cases here in Community, so keep an eye on the posts in the coming months.

Ready to amp up your service portals?

Join me, Peter Preston, Senior Product Marketing Manager, on January 19th, 2022, for an all-new Lightning Talk about the new forms experience and how you can use this new functionality to turbo-charge Jira Service Management for your teams and customers.

Register now

Additional FAQ

Where can I access the new form builder in Jira Service Management?	Forms is available to Project Administrators in Project Settings. Project Administrators can access templates and build forms for agents and customers to use on tickets and portals.
Can end-users create forms?	No. End-users can only enter information into forms and submit them. Jira Service Management agents interact with forms on requests where they can review the data submitted and, if necessary, even re-open a form for a customer to update or correct information.
Will forms immediately appear in the UI of a request for all Jira Service Management users?	No. Forms and an “Add Form” button will only appear in the issue view after at least one form is created and added to the project by a Project Administrator.
I already use the ProForma Cloud app. Will I be able to migrate my data into this new integrated version?	Existing ProForma Cloud customers should continue using the ProForma Marketplace app. We’ll contact you when your instance is ready to migrate. Your existing forms and data will not be lost when you do migrate.
Can I use the new form builder in Jira Software or Jira Work Management projects?	The new form building features are rolling out to Jira Service Management Cloud customers and we will share news soon about integrating forms with Jira Software and Jira Work Management.

We’re excited to share Jira Service Management’s forms with you! If you have questions or comments below, please leave them below. We’ll respond as soon as we’re able.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Awesome! Can’t wait to start working with these!

[Muhammad Fahad]

Excited to start using it. Thanks @Peter Preston

[Peter Reiser]

Very exciting news. We want to move all our  Servicedesks requests  from Email to forms and this feature was long awaited 

Can't wait to use it :-)

@Peter Preston Is there any way to accelerate the installation of this feature on our cloud site ? 

[Saloni Goel]

Exciting news. Hope I cam able to see this soon on my cloud site. I need dynamic form.

[Peter Preston]

@Peter Reiser - Happy to hear the excitement :) 

We chose to do a random rollout, so I can't see when a specific instance will get the new features. If you're a Jira Service Management Cloud customer, you should have the new form builder within the next 1-2 weeks. 

[Christophe Chedhomme]

@Peter Preston - Any more info on the ETA for this new feature? 

[Peter Preston]

@Christophe Chedhomme you should have forms in Jira Service Management Cloud by January 17th. Please note that some Enterprise accounts may not receive forms by this date. @mention me here again if you don't see forms in your Cloud instance by Tuesday, January 18.

[Peter Reiser]

@Peter Preston  we have not received the forms update for our site

Can you please check ? 

Best regards

Peter

[Jeff Hoover]

Mid Jan came and went and we do not have the new Forms option in our production instance either.

[Peter Preston]

@Peter Reiser @Jeff Hoover 

Thanks for letting me know. Looking into this with the team.

[Jeff Hoover]

Hi Peter,

It showed up for me sometime in the last 2-3 hours.  Thank you for checking.

Jeff

[Peter Preston]

Happy to hear it @Jeff Hoover

@Peter Reiser you should see forms in your instance now, too. 

[Peter Reiser]

@Peter Preston the forms show up know and work well. Many thanks Peter

[Jeff Hoover]

I'm attempting to use Templates to create some test forms, but some of the templates will not save.  After adding the template and pressing Save changes it produces the following error message:

"Error: Saving template form failed"

To reproduce, create a new form add one of the impacted templates and press "Save changes".  No other edits were made.

Templates I tried that did not work:

- Guest WIFI access

- Video conference support

- Shared drive access

I was able to successfully add "Asset record" to make a test form.  It seems that some templates work and some do not.  Is this a known issue?

[Simon H]

@Jeff Hoover thanks Jeff, moving those templates from the ProForma marketplace app to the native Forms/ProForma has thrown up a specific bug that we are working on fixing. 

Workaround: Typically the cause of this problem is an email field in the template, if you delete it and then recreate it you should be able to save the template. 

[Jeff Hoover]

Great to know, @Simon H, thank you for the workaround.

[Dimitri Spolspoel]

Hi @Peter Preston

This is really great news! Something we and our clients needed since so much time. Really excited about this!

Question: will it become more intuitive to use for agents and customers when we choose the option 'recommended in issue view'?

1. Now an agent needs to click [...], go into Actions Menu, search and click Add Form, before the agent can add a form. It would be more intuitive to show a pane like 'Similar requests' or 'Related KB articles' to show there are form suggestions/recommendations.
2. We can then add the form to the issue and make it 'external' for the customer to fill in, but:
   1. It seems we currently can't link to the form in an external comment. Will that be possible in the future? Like we can select/share a KB article in a comment.
   2. And/or will we be able to have a customer notification sent out when the agent makes a form available to the customer?
   3. If we ask the customer to open the ticket in the customer portal, the form is by default hidden behind 'Show details'. So we need to explain the customer in our comment that he needs to open the ticket in the portal and click 'Show details', before the form can be filled in.

Or am I missing out on some settings/functionalities?

[Peter Reiser]

How can we add "upload attachments" to a dynamic  form ? 

I know that I can add attachments to the Request Type form and then embed the form below, but that means that the Attachment is the first field of the form which does not make sense 

[Peter Reiser]

How can we access the dynamic form data fields and values using JSM automation  ? 

[Simon H]

@Peter Reiser in answer to your questions

Attachment field location

ProForma/Dynamic Forms don't currently have support for attachment fields. This is something we will build as soon as we can; however, in the meantime the workaround is to have the attachment field above the dynamic form. Not ideal we know and we have attachments as a very high priority for development.

Automation - Smart Fields

The recommendation is to link any field in a form to a Jira field if you need to trigger/use it for automation. Again this is something we want to implement as soon as we can. 

Possible workaround (not recommended): With ProForma, the original app behind this new functionality, there is some documentation on accessing form contents in smart values; however, doing so isn't supported and getting the relevant ids is harder in cloud unless you can inspect the data stored on the issue in the entity properties. 

[China Puriifer]

Many thanks for your kind information, what are the best opportunity to know which doc is best for us and which have some issues? could you please explain berifly?

[Simon H]

@China Puriifer the best documention to use if the official JSM Forms documentation you can find here.

[Peter Preston]

Hi @Dimitri Spolspoel 👋

Thanks for your feedback. I'll address each comment below.

1. Agents can use the [+] symbol to add a form to a request like this:

I like your idea of showing something like 'Similar requests' or 'Related KB articles'. Tagging @Simon H as the product manager on this. 

2. Re: notifying customers or a newly added form w/o having to give them instructions on how to open the portal and find the form. I'm not sure of any plans to solve this specific concern and will again flag this for Simon and the UX team to consider. 

[Dimitri Spolspoel]

Hi @Peter Preston

Thanks a lot for coming back to me on my comment.

The Form-panel and the + button to add a Form to the ticket, is only visible when there's already a Form linked to the ticket. But when a form is configured as 'Recommend form in issue', the Form panel doesn't appear:

Until you click [...], go into Actions Menu, search and click Add Form, When the configuration option is called 'Recommend form in issue', I would expect to see some kind of suggestion/recommendation to add the form in the issue view.

Hope @Simon H can clarify what's on the UX roadmap regarding suggesting/recommending of forms towards agents and communication of newly added external forms to customers.

Thanks a lot for your help.

[Peter Preston]

You're right, @Dimitri Spolspoel - I missed that context. It's a good recommendation and something that would help adoption of forms, too. Keep the feedback coming!