What are the must-have addons?

[Stacey E. Kimmel-Smith]

Hi all,

We are trialing Jira Service Desk for a large-ish, flat, team-based organization where members can serve on multiple teams. A few needs that are not out of the box...

• Assigning issues to teams
• Open and close a ticket that is resolved on first contact
• Field dependencies (e.g., select  problem type and subtype for each ticket, where the category subtype list is based on what problem type you have)

What are the must-have add-ons? How much should we budget for add-ons? 

Thanks!

[Ivan Tovbin]

Hi Stacey,

First off an issue can't be assigned to multiple agents at once. There can only be a single assignee at any given time. That's by design. Surely, with some addons that enable you to use scripts you can pick your assignee conditionnally and/or randomly from, say, a specific user group, but that's about it.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me share some of my experience with JSD. We are running a JSD (Server) instance with ~70 projects and a total of ~100 000 issues across them. Here's a list of addon's that we use or used:

- ScriptRunner. One of if not THE most popular addon out there. Gives you a MASSIVE flexibility in automating your processes and building advanced workflows. As the name suggests you must know how to write Groovy scripts, which involves having basic programming skills and knowledge of various Jira APIs.

- If you are not too keen on scripting but still want to be flexible in building your workflows then JMWE is the way to go. It's got a ton of built-in workflow conditions, validators and post-functions. It can also be used for scripting, if you'll feel like it at some point, just not to the same extent as ScriptRunner.

- Automation for Jira, as the name suggests is also used to Automate your processes. Very powerful, very easy to configure and use, no scripting involved. Wanna send an email to your customer when a field value is changed to a specific value? No problem! Need to set your assignee dynamically based on issue type? You can do that too!

- Extention for Jira. Huge improvements to your customer portal. Show SLA on the customer portal and set up field dependencies, among other things.

- Email This Issue. A must-have addon if your customers are using mostly the email channel to raise support tickets. Among other things, it allows you to configure custom email templates for different projects/users/issues (based on JQL). Canned responses. Send all previous communication (comments) in every agent reply (just like in regular email). Render the value of any issue field in your templates. Send actual files in attachments (out of the box jira can only send links to attachments which requires your customers to log in to portal to download them). Configure custom notifications on a workflow post function. And more!

Please note, that you can aquire a free evaluation license for up to 90 days for every addon, so feel free to try them out before you make a decision to purchase or not.

[Alexey Matveev]

I would just add that there are always alternative add-ons. For example, for Scriptrunner it could be Jython, Power Scripts.

For email this issue it could be Enterprise Email Handler for Jira.

All add-ons have pros and cons. You should choose carefully. Before buying an add-on make sure that the add-on is right for you. If your instance is large then make a performance testing of the add-on.

[Stacey E. Kimmel-Smith]

Thanks so much! So, are these addons costly, do the figure into the annual maintenance or are they one-time purchases? I'm thinking esp. of scriptrunner.

I did find an earlier thread that talked about team assignment as a can-do. What we do at our institution is assign to a team (in our current non-Jira system). Everyone on the team is notified via email, and based on who is working that day, a member of the team will pick up the ticket. It works well and we meet our SLAs. I would be preferable if we could duplicate that in Jira.

[Jack Brickey]

Lots of great input here. The other thing to mention is cloud vs. server. Given you mentioned large-ish I would recommend server. This is important if you want to leverage addons beyond some basics. However, cloud is a great solution for many scenarios and is often a great way to start so something to consider. 

As for the costs just go to the Marketplace and look it up to get you numbers. 

Regarding assigning to team, keep in mind that the way you use JSD is that you leverage queues. You can have the team watch the queue and work collectively in keeping it in check. You don’t need to assign at creation.

[RianS]

I'll mention a couple of other plugins as well:

JIRA Workflow Toolbox is similar to JMWE when modifying some workflows with special validators, conditions, postfunctions without needing to do scripting.

nFeed is a great plugin when you need to pull data into custom fields from database, REST, or other sources.

Project Configurator for JIRA is a great plugin if you are doing JIRA changes like creating or editing new projects, workflows, or custom fields in a staging instance and promote them into a production environment. It can pull the info and import just the project configuration instead of having to manually move the changes.

[Dzmitry Hryb _Deviniti_]

There are very good options presented. I'll drop some more, if you don't mind :)

• Assigning issues to teams

As @Jack Brickey mentioned, the queues in JSD are available for all the team members, so there's no direct need to do that. Regarding that your company is rather large, there should be tons of queues on the Service Desk. To handle them much easier than default configuration allows, I'd recommend trying the Queues app. It extends the out-of-the-box possibilities greatly - watch the webinar I hosted to know the details.

• Open and close a ticket that is resolved on first contact

@Ivan Tovbin said about Email This Issue, which is right about your situation, if I'm not mistaken.

• Field dependencies (e.g., select  problem type and subtype for each ticket, where the category subtype list is based on what problem type you have)

The same goes for the Extension app, which includes the Dynamic Forms that you need. We also have this released as a separate app - check it out, if you don't need the rest of the Extension's features.

[Olga Rusnak]

On another note, recently our team published an article where we discussed what the Top 10 Add-on for Jira Cloud and Server instances are. You might also be interested in taking a look at it!

[Stacey E. Kimmel-Smith]

Thanks! Will check it out...

[Tarun Sapra]

Most of the great add-ons have already been listed. I would like to add that if you are looking for large scale reporting and sharing those reports with management and 3rd party vendors/customers then you need to have "Better Excel", we use it pretty heavily in our instance.

[Filip Heremans]

Hi, related to this topic: does anyone have experience with plugins that allows you to customize the layout of the servicedesk portals? For instance changing the width of the viewport, adding links and information, ..

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, try https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.refinedwiki.jira.servicedesk.refinedtheme/server/overview

[Filip Heremans]

Thanks, what's your experience with this plugin, Nic?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Pretty much what it says on the tin - skinning a customer portal.