Does Jira have something that can act as a message board similar to Basecamp?

[Ben Johnson]

Currently, my team uses Basecamp. I was brought on as a project manager and have been working on implementing things that I think will help out their procedures and keep them more organized. One of the things I have been pushing for is a move towards Jira.

I have used Jira at other companies and I think it will help a lot here. However, there is one feature they use in Basecamp that I don't know if it is possible to replicate in Jira. The message boards.

They use message boards to have the customer ask for changes, which I think would be better done in Jira Service Management, as it will actually be trackable, but they also will use Basecamp messages as a communication device that we probably wouldn't want a ticket for.

Sometimes it is just a status update, a question, or sending over finished assets that were requested over a Zoom meeting. On the message you can have comments from either us or the client. Is there something in Jira that can replicate this feature in some way? I'm not sure if I'm overthinking this and maybe they would be ok being tickets?

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Ben,

While I'm no expert on using Basecamp, from your description of using it, and a quick review of their site, I think I now at least have a basic understanding of its functionality.

Jira does not have a message boards feature. But from looking at their website, I can't help but think that the types of information shown there really make me think more of our Confluence product.  Specifically the information such as VPN access steps, personnel introductions, team updates, etc, these are all things that we at Atlassian would be far more likely to document within Confluence instead of Jira. 

Mind you, that those specific example topics I mentioned are really not meant to be customer facing.  For customer interaction, Jira Service Management requests are where I would expect us to manage the majority of topics you mentioned.  But this tends to expect a one-on-one interaction with the customer.

I wasn't able to find any existing feature requests for Jira Cloud products to have a message board type feature.  I also tried to search through our Marketplace to see if there was some other 3rd party vendor that provided such a feature, but I have not found something yet that appears to match the description here.

I hope this helps.

Andy