📣 Early access program for a brand new Team field in Jira Software

[#1]

Hello, Atlassian community 👋

We have an upcoming release of a brand new Teams field in Jira and we’d like to invite you to join a limited Early Access Program!

With this field enabled, users will be able to

1. Create and manage teams

2. Associate Jira issues with Teams

3. Search (JQL), filter, and create reports for issues by Team

4. View the issues associated with a team on the team profile (across Jira, Confluence and more)

We are launching this as part of a larger mission to enable our products to be more effective for teamwork. This field uses the Atlassian Teams concept (the one that is accessible through the People menu on the top nav on Jira and Confluence cloud editions). We are also working on unifying the different team concepts you see in our products today into one single Atlassian Teams concept that can be used across the Atlassian product suite.

If this sounds interesting to you, we would love it if you would join us in trying out these early features to help us shape the future of Atlassian Teams.

What’s involved in this?

We’d like to give you access to an early release of the Atlassian Team field for use in your daily workflows. We’ll invite you to join a private online community group where you can report bugs, ask questions, suggest ideas, and generally join the Atlassian Teams product team conversation! We may also email you directly with questions outside of the online group.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for teams that currently use the free & standard edition of Jira software.

We are hoping to include users who regularly work as teams and want to improve teamwork and accelerate change in their organization.

Who is running it?

The group will be managed by

• Anish Deenadayalan - Senior Product Manager, Platform

• Blake Fawcett - Lead Designer, Platform

How long am I needed?

The EAP will run for 3 months starting mid-November.

How do I sign up?

Please let me know in the comments if you are interested or email me at adeena@atlassian.com

Also please fill out this form: EAP - Team fields in Jira software

Thanks - I’m looking forward to shaping the future of Atlassian products with you!

[John Funk]

Thanks for the opportunity!

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hey @Anish Deena ,

Happy to see this going in to EAP!

I'm gonna start with the obvious questions here :)

• Is the EAP only for JSW or also for JSM? (I feel like teams are more used in a JSM context to be honest)
• And nothing to do with the EAP but just to get you on the record ;) will this also make it's way towards Datacenter?

Filling out the form no matter what :)

[Jack Brickey]

How do Teams relate to Groups and Roles?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Definitely interested and looking forward to providing feedback!

[Mykenna Cepek]

We'd like to know how this proposed Teams field relates to the Team field in Advanced Roadmaps?

The Team field in Advanced Roadmaps is not fully implemented (e.g. it is not available in Automation), and that makes this admin unhappy.

I might also recommend covering field disambiguation in the documentation for this new Teams field (e.g. for JQL), since I suspect some Jira instances already have an existing custom field named Teams.

[Matt Doar]

Is the field to be named "Team" or "Teams"? Both are used in this article and it makes a difference

[Matt Doar]

And as Mykenna said, is this going to clash with the Team field from Advanced Roadmaps in Data Center?

[Anish Deena]

Hi @Dirk Ronsmans

As always, its great to hear from you. 

1. Will teams be in JSM? 

This EAP is focused only on JSW. But it is absolutely the plan to bring Teams into JSM. We'll need to first figure out a few things (eg: how groups and teams will work together in approvals, etc) before introducing it in JSM.

2. Will this make its way into data centre? 

We do not have any plans to take this to data centre as of now and will be entirely cloud-focused over the medium term

Thanks for signing up. Looking forward to getting your input on the experience :) 

[Anish Deena]

Hi @Jack Brickey ,

Great question. Teams and Groups are separate concepts as of now but we are currently working on simplifying the model and bridging the two concepts. While Teams and Groups will live as separate concepts in the short term, expect more interoperability, security and permissions policies and features to be shared between the two. We will also be making it simpler for Admins to have oversight into Teams as part of this work

[Anish Deena]

Hi @Mykenna Cepek

We are currently working on unifying this Teams concept with the Team field in Advanced Roadmaps. As a result, there will be one team field that can be used across Jira (and other products), thus simplifying the experience for users.

The reason this EAP is only open to free and standard Jira users is because we are currently unifying the two fields and as a result cannot onboard premium and enterprise customers since their sites will have the Advanced Roadmaps field and we want to avoid any potential conflict until unified.

Good input on field disambiguation, our documentation will be covering this. Thanks :) 

[Anish Deena]

Hi @Matt Doar ,

The field will be named Team and will become the standard team field in JSW and unify the team field in Advanced Roadmaps. There will not be any conflicts with the Advanced Roadmaps team field in data centre since we do not have plans to roll this out to DC anytime soon.

Thanks and looking forward to getting your feedback.

[Jack Harding]

SUPER interested :)

[Janna]

i would

[Danny]

Sounds like an interesting opportunity to test this out. 

[Jimi Wikman]

I am open for it.

[Ajay _view26_]

Would love to try it out!

[Jason Michaud]

I think this is what we've been waiting for; but reading your announcement is a bit confusing given our setup. I am the Jira Admin overseeing Jira Core, Software, and Service Desk. We use Jira Software to manage out Internal IT Business Projects and we use Jira Service Desk to manage our customer trouble tickets and service requests. When we went live with Jira Service Desk 3 years ago, we have always functioned on a Team's concept. For example, trouble ticket comes in from customer, Help Desk then assigns it to the Desktop Team, the coordinator of the Desktop team, then assigns the ticket out to the Desktop Tech assigned to fix the issue. Since Jira 3 years ago did not support that type of workflow, we have to build an additional custom field called "Assignment Group" and created about 13 User groups for each member of our Department to align to. We then have an automation behind the scenes that updates the Assignee or updates the Assignment Group to coincide with however that Assignee is aligned to a User Group (i.e. Assignment Group). You can kind of think "Assignment Group is the same as the Team concept.

So with your proposed solution it sound like this will suit our needs. But then you say in a comment above that this is not supported in Jira Service Desk right now - only Software. So how would that impact us?

Also - we are currently on your Server products which are end of life. We plan to migrate to your data Center products - but you say you don't have any plans to use Teams with data Center.

So I think we are out of luck. Correct?

[Jimi Wikman]

@Jason Michaudthis will not be of any use to you for quite some time. EAP will last until May and then you probably have some fixes to do before rolling out in June or August, most likely. Expect at least 6-12 months of evaluation and improvements before it will even be considered for DC and then another 6-12 months before it is released. That means you will not even have to consider this for another year at least.

@Anish Deenacould you elaborate a bit more on how teams will come closer to groups? Or rather, what features they would share? I am a bit concerned since I do not think you should mix permission sets with affiliations, which is how I see groups and teams. I am sure you already have that in mind, so I just wanted to hear if you have more information about this at this time, or if this is something you need to explore a bit more before you want to share?

Also, who can create teams, and who will be able to manage the teams? Today, you can sort of manage teams in your Jira projects if you use a people based setup. Group based setup is in a weird place where it creates black holes, since the Jira Project Admin can assign groups, but they can not manage the people in the group.  Please try to avoid this with teams because it is a huge problem with security and people management at the moment.

For me I think teams is a much-needed structure, especially for JSM as @Dirk Ronsmans said earlier where we tend to use group assignments rather than individual assignments for Incidents in particular. It would also be good if we could have custom fields with team assignment, just like we can have user assignments today?

I like that you add this to Advanced Roadmaps as well, so if you could just add resource management to AR as well, then I might be able to convince some companies to get back to Premium again :)

Also, what are the plans for Teams moving forward? It already looks like you plan a team space type of setup, but will that be taken even further? Are there plans for team based boards/dashboards or perhaps even connection to team spaces?

[Ben Kreischer]

I would like to be a part of this - thanks!

[Walter Buggenhout]

I think everyone agrees that this is a key thing in planning, tracking, managing and reporting on work for teams inside Jira.

Many of the above comments do rightfully point out that this is going to be a challenging endeavour, with many dependencies on existing features across tools and marketplace apps. There's also a lot of things to consider that go way beyond just introducing a custom field.

Just because of all that, I think participating in the EAP and sharing feedback as the brainstorm and development evolves over time is a really valuable opportunity!

[Walter Buggenhout]

As for Data Center, that comes bundled with Advanced Roadmaps, which already has a Team concept included. Although it wouldn't hurt to give that a bit more love, there definitely is something of a foundation present there as well.

[Jose Luis Gaitan]

Really interested!!

[Lucas Machado]

I hope those Teams can be used as @ mentions in comments and automation rules to notify all members of the Team.

Also, OpsGenie already has its own Teams. Will Jira Teams be fully integrated with that?

[Lauren Jean]

I would love to be a part of this! I have many instances that it would be a drastic improvement for our people and workflow. 

[Oleh Vasyliv _Reliex_]

I am interested and really appreciate work in this direction! 

Will the new Team field be accessible and managed just like any other standard custom field through the REST API?

This is very important in terms of apps that run on top of Jira.