JSM June 2024: Ask me Anything (AMA)

[Jeremy Cooley]

Hello Community members!

For this JSM June, we're excited to bring you even closer to the Jira Service Management product team with an Ask Me Anything (AMA). This is your chance to ask all your service management questions to our panel of experts. The hosts of this AMA will include our team of product experts and engineers.

• Jason D’Cruz
• Doro Linneweber
• Kaushik Mitra
• Divyanshi Vashist
• Dhanapal Mohanasamy
• Gabriel Raubenheimer
• Jehan Gonsalkorale
• Gemma Aldrich
• Anurag Datta Roy

As part of JSM June, participants in our AMA will also earn the JSM June Wonder Badge!

Here's how it works:

• Add your questions to this discussion between June 18th - June 27.
• Be sure to take a look at other community members' questions and up-vote those that you find interesting.
• We will respond to all questions until June 27th. Watch the page and be ready to add follow-up questions and discuss further with other Community members. We'll wrap the event up on June 27th at 8 p.m. PST but we will be sure to follow up with answers to any questions we didn't get to.
  
  

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Don't forget:

• You can keep track of all JSM June activities and challenges here. ☀️ Commenting on three or more JSM June challenges will earn you the mega JSM June Community badge.
• New to Jira Service Management? Learn more here.

[Vronik · Accepted solution]

Hi team

I have some questions
1.- Will ROVO be available for JSM?
2.- Change management would be ideal to have applied 100% to ITIL
3.- It would be fantastic to be able to make a beautiful portal without having to resort to plug-ins, with JSM's own functionalities
4.- Improvements in the dashboards

These, as always, are wishes, the tool is excellent, but with added improvements it would be exceptional

Greetings

[Jeremy Cooley]

Hey @Vronik ! 

I am consulting with a few of our PMs regarding your questions and we will follow up ASAP :) Thanks for your patience! 

[Jason D_Cruz]

Hi @Vronik ,

On your dashboards question,do you use the dashboards in Atlassian Analytics or those in-product? Are there any particular dashboards you'd like to see improvement to? Are you looking for better out of the box visualisations, more customisation or something else?

[Nicole Pitaro]

Hi @Vronik – regarding your first question about Rovo: Yes! Rovo is a standalone product that will require separate purchase and will integrate with your entire Atlassian portfolio, including Jira Service Management. You'll be able to do things like interacting with Rovo agents directly from within your Jira Service Management workflows. Please note that Atlassian Intelligence must be activated for any Atlassian product you wish to use with Rovo.

[Jovin · Accepted solution]

Hey JSM Product team,

Absolutely love the product and everything it can do. Looking to find out whether these are in consideration for the roadmap:

• JQL SLAs - Expanding SLAs to be fully JQL including the Start, Pause, Stop conditions
• More Screen Options - Allowing certain screens for issue types to be visible based on your group membership
  • e.g. "Service Desk Analyst" sees "Incident Analyst View", but "Service Desk Leadership" sees "Incident Manager View", and "Jira Administrator" sees "Incident All Data View" etc.
• Ability to have the "Linked Issues" moved to a tab instead of always being visible on all tabs no matter where the field is positioned in a Screen
• Ability to use "Teams" in Request Forms (as default values), and in Automation (without needing to use JSON).

[Jeremy Cooley]

Hey Jovin! 

Hope all is well and thanks for the question! We have a few PMs associated with each of these feature areas so I am doing some internal research for you. I will let you know what I find out ASAP. 

[Jovin]

Thanks @Jeremy Cooley - looking forward to it!

[Jeremy Cooley]

Hey @Jovin 

Thanks for your patience here as I did some internal research for you. I have a few answers for you and a few followup questions as well. :)

1. JQL SLAs - Expanding SLAs to be fully JQL including the Start, Pause, Stop conditions - Expanding SLAs to be fully JQL is not currently on our roadmap but I have shared this question as feedback to the appropriate product manager here. Hopefully this is something we can consider for FY25 planning.

2. More Screen Options - Allowing certain screens for issue types to be visible based on your group membership (e.g. “Service Desk Analyst” sees “Incident Analyst View”, but “Service Desk Leadership” sees “Incident Manager View”, and “Jira Administrator” sees “Incident All Data View” etc.) I shared your request for more screen options with 2 members of our product team and they were very intrigued by your example. This isn’t something on the roadmap right now but I can definitely see the value of a feature like this and will follow up with the PMs here as they do FY25 planning. 

3. Ability to have the “Linked Issues” moved to a tab instead of always being visible on all tabs no matter where the field is positioned in a Screen - For this question, could you give us a little more detail on the friction this current linked issue experience is causing for your team? cc: @Kaushik Mitra 

4. Ability to use “Teams” in Request Forms (as default values), and in Automation (without needing to use JSON). For this question, could you give us an example for how this would be used by your team? For example, would this be used for ticket assignment? Thanks for confirming! 

[Jovin]

Thanks for the detailed response @Jeremy Cooley !

• Awesome, thanks for that - or event being able to say "Leave Status: XYZ", this would make the criteria cleaner (e.g. instead of having 5 "Entered Status" you could have 1 "Leave")
• This is definitely a bit of an unusual one but thought I'd throw it out there!
• As an example, when you configure a screen that has multiple tabs the "Attachment" and "Linked Issues" fields are visible and able to be put on one of the tabs. However, those 2 sections will always appear below the tabbed section on the view/edit screen. It's not a major issue but would make it much easier to have cleaner views! See below:

On the View/Edit screen I have 3 tabs, you can see here that I've specified "Linked Issues" should be on the "Incident Details" tab.
Here on the actual issue of that issue type which uses that screen you can see I have "Customer facing details" tab selected, but the Linked Issues are still visible, this is the same for all tabs on the issue view.

• So we'd ideally use this in one of two ways:
  • As a "Hidden" field on a Request Form so that we can say (for example) a request called "My password doesn't work" will always default to the team "IAM Team".
  • As part of automation for our "generic" requests which allows the customer to select what is wrong, e.g. they raise a generic ticket and choose "Emails" as the component, we can have the automation choose "O365 Team" as the team to be routed to. We can do this currently, but it requires use of the JSON and I much prefer the visual aspects of automation!
  • We currently workaround this by having a custom field called "Assignment Group" which we use in our filters to have queues, but this doesn't let us tag those users, we don't use the actual groups in Jira either as we can't limit the group selector by regex (e.g. "Only groups with "Assignment" in their name)

[Jeremy Cooley]

Thanks for this context @Jovin !!

I have shared these examples with the product team so I appreciate all the screenshots. Although it doesn't look like we are currently working on this, it did peak the team's interest. I will let you know if one of the PMs ends up picking this up and perhaps we could sync again with you for a more detailed deep dive? 

[Walter Marcelo Dente]

Yes please. This is important to explain to my leader.

Thank you

[Jovin]

@Jeremy Cooley Sounds good! Always happy to connect and share contexts/ideas/concepts!

[Mario GELES · Accepted solution]

Hi Jira Service Management product team,

Do you know when AI in the customer portal will be release ? And what will be the next AI features in JSM ? 

[Nicole Pitaro]

Hey @Mario GELES – The virtual agent on portal will begin rolling out GA at the beginning of July – keep an eye on the community for updates on availability.

You can also check out a run down of what's on the roadmap for AI in Jira Service Management in this recent post, which includes virtual agent expansion to additional channels, AI agent recommendations, new AIOps capabilities, and more.

[Mario GELES]

Hi Nicole,

Thank you for this answer so many nice features on the way. I am looking forward to try the virtual agent in the customer portal. 

Have a nice day

[Stephen_Lugton · Accepted solution]

One thing I've been wanting to ask about is the possibility of being able to use information entered in a form and use it to update other Jira tickets etc. (or an explanation of how to use it if this functionality is already available.) 

For instance we track our data products in Assets and would like to be able to use JSM forms to create new data product entries in Assets and have an approval stage in a workflow after which the information in the form could be used to automatically create a new Asset rather than our current approach of create as a csv and import.

[Jovin]

Hey @Stephen_Lugton

I haven't tried this but have you tried:

1. Create the custom fields required for the automation
2. Create the form and link the fields on the form to the custom fields
   
   1. Configure the form to be "Lock on submission"
3. Create an automation with the below:
   1. Trigger: Forms submitted (specify the form(s))
   2. Create actions/conditions as required to add/edit/update based on the form submitted

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Stephen_Lugton

We are aware that there is a gap with forms where the form fields are not available in automation and can’t be leveraged in other Jira tickets. We are looking into this but, in the meantime, we recommend you use linked Jira fields for the form fields you want to use in other issues.

So, the workaround for pulling form content into assets would be to create Jira fields that map to each of those fields.

That said, we hear you and understand that this is not ideal, we’ll review this work and will see if we can solve it in the near term.

Hope that helps, 

Jehan

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

All-star lineup!! I will add more questions later I am sure, but here is the first:

@Jehan Gonsalkorale  - How many guitars to you actually own? And how often do you get to play them? 

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hahah! I have far too many guitars! 

I think the total number is:

1. Four electric guitars
2. Three acoustics
3. One bass
4. One electronic piano
5. One drum kit

I don't get to play them as much as I'd like to but I am in a little band these days. :) 

[Susan Waldrip · Accepted solution]

Hi, thanks for providing answers to the AMA!

Two question please:

1. What naming conventions do you find useful for Jira/JSM elements like workflows, boards, schemes, etc.?

2. Which items do you include or use the most in your Audit Log for debugging and troubleshooting?

Thanks!

[Palak Setia]

Hi Susan!

For #1) It's contextual. For example for a Service Desk, I may call an issue an Incident but for HR I may call it a Case. In general, the closer you stay to Atlassian/Jira naming as is, the clearer the communication feels between teams when collaborating.

For #2) This document should be helpful https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/audit-activities-in-jira-applications/

[Susan Waldrip]

Thanks @Palak Setia , I appreciate it!

[Walter Marcelo Dente · Accepted solution]

I have two questions:

1- Request authorizations: Do the approvers need a license to approve a request? 

"Who is looking?" and "Request Participants" do this options need a license?

2- We need an inventory tool to replace our spreadsheet. I saw a few top ranked but I would like to know your opinion.

[Jovin]

Hey @Walter Marcelo Dente

I'm not part of the product team but have investigated some of this heavily in my organisation.

1. Request authorizations: Do the approvers need a license to approve a request? 
   • Nope! A couple of things though:
     • If you need them to approve via a group they must have an Atlassian Account (not a Portal Only account), but it can have just Customer access applied. Note that this will count towards Atlassian Guard subscription if they are not in a Non-Billable Policy
     • If you just need to be able to add them directly to the "Approvers" field, you can use either an Atlassian Account or a Portal Only account
2. "Who is looking?" and "Request Participants" do these options need a license?
   • Also nope! But to be able to "watch" a ticket, the customer must be in the Participants section first so they can access the ticket in the Portal
3. Need an inventory tool to replace our spreadsheet.
   • Couple of options:
     • JSM Assets (via JSM Premium subscription) - this is native asset management built into JSM, but your costs will increase
     • SnipeIT Asset Management - this is an open source system that is free to use if you host it yourself, or a low cost if hosting through them. You can then connect it to Jira via the Marketplace App.
     • Use a Jira Project with custom fields & issue types - This is a bit of a hack and doesn't work super well, but it's a free thing that's integrated into JSM. Create a new project, create some custom issue types with custom fields that you like, and then you can link JSM tickets to the "tickets" in that project.

[Walter Marcelo Dente]

Thanks, Jovin for your help.

[Grady Gausman]

Hi @Walter Marcelo Dente , 

Responding to your second question around inventory management, we have a significant number of customers using Assets in JSM to track and manage all kinds of inventory - from traditional IT assets to people, pianos, vehicle - anything of value to your business.

Once inventory has been imported and organized in Assets, you can connect those items to request processes or people, create automation rules or relationships between assets, as well produce and share reports.

A couple resources here for you to learn more:

• Demo video (7 min): https://play.goconsensus.com/b6b3f6462 

• Product overview: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/product-guide/getting-started/asset-and-configuration-management#how-it-works

• Getting started guide: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/product-guide/tips-and-tricks/assets-cloud-get-started#overview

• In-depth white paper on all functionality: https://www.atlassian.com/whitepapers/it-asset-and-service-configuration-management-in-jira-service-management

[Walter Marcelo Dente]

Thanks a lot Grady

[Joe Pursel · Accepted solution]

I would like Atlassian Intelligence to be HIPPA compliant as we cannot use the JSM or Confluence AI until it is.

Can you provide me with any time frame this feature will be available for all JSM AI users?

Thank you,

Joe

[Jeremy Cooley]

@Joe Pursel - thanks for reaching out! 

HIPAA compliance for Atlassian Intelligence is definitely on our radar as we work to expand our compliance programs across all of Atlassian Intelligence. We don't have a specific date at this time, but once we have more information, we will be sure to share it on our roadmap and here in the community. I will pass your question along to our product team as feedback to help move this process along.  

[Doug Cardona]

Please do! Since the announcements at Team '23 and Team '24, I feel like instances with compliance programs are being left behind with the new AI features.

[Andy Gladstone · Accepted solution]

Thanks for providing this platform for AMA!

Will JSM ever support exposing read-only fields to customers in the portal? There are many internal use fields that the support team utilizes that should be editable by support agents, but read-only for the customer. Currently these fields are only visible internally. We'd like to be able to toggle them on/off for visibility (view-only) externally to provide the customer a more holistic view of what is going on in their service request.

Thanks! 

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for taking the time to ask this question. We are very much aware of this need and are reviewing this as something we have every intention of doing in future.

While we don’t have any immediate plans to implement this, we have escalated this and will review it.

Sorry I can’t make any promises at this point but we hear you and will make sure it gets reviewed.

I hope that at least clarifies things,

Jehan

[Jeremy Cooley]

@Andy Gladstone

I also wanted to recommend that you vote for this feature request and watch it for updates. We have an open feature request ticket for it here: HERE.

[Andy Gladstone]

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ · Accepted solution]

Why is there no feature for keeping linked issues updated?

Use Case: In Incident Management I might get x Requests for the same Root Cause. I can link all Requests but would still have to update them all manually. I would love to just link them all, mark one as the "main" and have them automated automatically without me having to use Automation rules to achieve that.

The only thing that comes close to that is the Multi-Edit feature in the Queue-View.

[Jeremy Cooley]

Hey @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_

Thanks for reaching out! 

The PM who would be best to answer this is going to be OOO until Monday. I have asked him to follow up with you on this thread when he gets back into the office. Thanks for your patience here! 

[Kaushik Mitra]

Thanks a lot for sharing this input @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ ! 

Being able to link similar issues together is something we have kicked off on JSM with the similar incidents feature. For now, that capability doesn't serve the use case you have mentioned above, but forms the first step of us being able to better identify similar incidents, and then align better to the use case you have mentioned above.

Even prior to using AI to enable this, I do believe you are also aiming at doing this in cases where incidents have been manually linked together. We are yet to add this to our roadmap, and will assess this to add to our future roadmap.

To be sure of your use cases here, could you help with a little more details on what all you'd like to update in linked incidents? Are you looking at matching statuses only, or are you looking at a more detailed update including comments/chat conversations/stakeholder communications etc as well? This will really help us identify our future roadmap item.

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

So If I could dream:

I find similar open issues with the "similar issues" panel (on in my queue view) and link them together with a specific Link-Type. Now, anytime I update one of the issues, I want to be asked whether to update the other issues as well. In order of importance:

1. Status
2. Comment
3. Fields

I can't say anything about the Stakeholder / Chat options, as I've not used those in production yet.

Also: If I mark an Incident as "Major" it would be great if Jira would suggest pushing a note to the Portal page similar to the Comment-Screen that you get when transitioning an issue.

[Kaushik Mitra]

Thanks a lot for that summary Rebekka. I'll pass this on internally and we'll evaluate how we can enable this on JSM. 

We may want to do some additional validation of this, and so may reach out to do a little more detailed deep dive. Please let me know if that would be okay with you? 

[Valerie Knapp · Accepted solution]

Hey team, I am wondering about how and whether Loom will be integrated into JSM and other Atlassian tools.

[Jeremy Cooley]

Hi @Valerie Knapp! Hope all is well! 

We are deep in the process of embedding loom throughout the suite - already you can embed Loom across the entire platform and record across your entire tech stack with the desktop recorders and extension. For FY25, we will start with embedding the recording capability in Confluence and Jira and re-assess after that.

Keep an eye on the community as we will be sure to post updates here as they become available. :) 

[Dan Breyen · Accepted solution]

Can more field be added in Smart Values for Automations and Canned Responses?  That will make these functions more useful.  

Any ideas when Canned Responses would be available in Status Change messages?

[Joseph]

@Dan Breyen 

We are actively looking to add Canned Responses in Status change (transition) screens. Please follow this JAC ticket for updates. 

cheers

joe

[Jeremy Cooley]

@Dan Breyen - I am also looking into your question about more smart value fields. I will follow up with you here ASAP. 

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Dan Breyen

Thanks for taking the time to ask this question. What smart values would you be looking for in automation and canned responses? We’d love to understand more about your use case.

Thanks,

Jehan

[Dan Breyen]

Things like 'First Name'.  It's really corny to tell your customers that you've been working with... "Hey Joe Smith, thanks for getting back to me.  I'll follow up and let you know what I find.  Dan Breyen".

It's not conversational at all. 

Fix Version would be great.  So I can say "Hey customer, your fix will be in release 1.2" without having to manually fill it in.

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Thanks for this @Dan Breyen absolutely understand where you're coming from. We don't have any immediate solutions for this but I'll flag it with the team. 

In the meantime, there is a workaround for automation (that I imagine you are already across but worth sharing in any case) which can be found here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Using-firstname-of-assignee-instead-of-firstname-and-lastname/qaq-p/1761353. 

The recommended solution is to use this logic in your smart value: {{issue.assignee.displayName.split(" ").first}}

This is essentially string manipulation which is only a stop gap and not applicable to canned responses, so I'll see what we can do to fix that. 

And I hear you on the Fix Version request. 

Sorry I can't be more help, but I'll see what I can do to make this a higher priority. 

Jehan

[Susan Waldrip]

Thanks for posting this, @Jehan Gonsalkorale , I've been wanting to do this! Feels like I'm cheating, though, since I haven't spent hours trying to figure it out myself.  :)

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Glad to hear it worked!  I know the feeling, I always steal good ideas from StackOverflow :) 

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

JSM Cloud is way ahead of JSM data center, when will some of the more basic cloud features be added to data center?  For Example:

• Why do I have to pay for Proforma on data center?
• Advanced conversations
• Additional templates 
• Change management
• Service registry, status and dependency
• Admin insights

[Emily Dang]

Hi @Brant Schroeder, thanks for participating in our AMA and for sharing your feedback with us. Our team really values your input as we continuously strive to enhance Data Center. We’ll be sure to share this feedback with our Jira Service Management Data Center team. Our current focus for investment in Data Center is on enhancing security, performance, and scalability. You can follow all of our roadmap updates and product improvements here: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/data-center

[Brant Schroeder · Accepted solution]

One more question.  Are there plans to improve and / or expand assets functionality?  What is on the roadmap?

[Dorothea Linneweber]

Hi Brant! We recommend you have a look at out keynote recording from Team24 that expands on the roadmap and areas of focus through 2024 and beyond (available here under ‘Driving better data quality and decisions with Assets Data Manager’). At a high level, scalability, performance and compliance are top of the list, as well as the launch of Assets Data Manager as a new feature addition.

[Stéphane Veraart · Accepted solution]

I have a bit of a chicken&egg question that I haven't been able to answer yet In terms of implementing it in JSM without using add-ons and/or browsing the community posts.

We have shared resources that can be reserved by our teams.

Let's say a bike for example.

Said bike is either available or not at a certain date/time when requesting it through a from. But checking this against the time the person wants to reserve it, is a bit hard to accomplish. Challenge here is that the AQL you would use to fetch the objects from the Assets cannot be created with dynamic data, i.e. only with a pre-defined query. This instead of selecting the objects that meet the criteria objecttype, 'reservation date/time' and so on, to be able to show only available resources.

In what way would you use JSM functionality to accomplish this?

[Palak Setia]

Hi Stéphane!

I see the need for a more dedicated "Calendaring" function in your use case here for Assets.

Today you're likely looking at the Attribute level for the Time value, but another option to consider might be creating another Object in Assets called "Time Slots" which could be an hourly slot per record. You'd then associate an object to this Time Slot object and be able to change the status of the Bike upon "check out." I hope this conceptual version sparks some ideas! 

[Stéphane Veraart]

Hi Palak,

Thank you for your suggestions. We have indeed been able to find a solution similar to your suggestions, but the challenge then becomes with the amount of timeslots needed and checking if they're available. The object may be reserved at certain times in the future but the amount of reservations can be literally from zero to infinite. Also there will be similar objects (like a bike for example) that might be available at the preferred time slot, so it also requires checking across multiple objects. It seems simple, but implementation is quite tricky.

[Palak Setia]

Hi Stéphane!

Agree, it's a use case that can become hectic in terms of configuration. We'll relay this feedback to our Product team to review and plan around.

Thank you for your insight!

[Gerson Prieto · Accepted solution]

Hi Team!

We just migrated recently from a server instance to Cloud and my question is the following one :)

Is there any difference in the use of screens and workflows that appear as "legacy" and the new ones, somehow is there any way to migrate to new ones or we'll find benefits if we do it?

Thanks!

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Gerson Prieto

Great question! If I’m understanding correctly, it sounds like you are talking about the new workflow editor and the new transition screen experience?

If so, it could be that you have some features enabled that we don’t yet support. We are working on it, so this discrepancy should be fixed in due course. We think the new experiences are better, but you are not missing out on any new features or capabilities.

I hope this helps!

Jehan

[Gerson Prieto]

Yes, that was indeed :)
Thanks for the answer @Jehan Gonsalkorale 

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Not a problem at all, Gerson! Happy to help :)