How to handle out of office periods or holidays and not change responsibles/assignees

[Fabio Sarmento]

Hi Community, 

I have a few situations here where I need to make someone receive emails when customers make interactions in tickets which are assigned to someone who could be out of office, on holidays or not part of our company anymore.

I dont want to use "request participants" and I had an idea to do as automation with a custom field, but I would like to know if Jira has already a solution for that or any suiteapp.

Regards,
Fabs

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Fabio Sarmento and welcome to the Community!

Email is a very poor work management tool, as the use case you describe very well illustrates. You can indeed use your project's notification scheme to send notifications to:

• a specific email address (this could be an email alias for your team e.g.)
• a user custom field (a field where you can specify a specific backup user)
• a group custom field (a field where you can specify a Jira user group)
• ...

However, ask yourself the question if you want to rely on email to organise work for your team. JSM offers queues where you can visualise issues in lists that can be monitored and managed collectively by your team, without having to rely on mailboxes.

Also: customers usually comment on tickets when they were asked a question or if they feel they are not being helped fast enough. In the first scenario, you can and should make sure your workflow can handle statuses like waiting for customer and in progress (or something like that) and transition between them when you or your customer interacts with a ticket. That way, status tells you whether its your team that needs to act or the customer.

Hope this helps!