Scale your Cloud footprint with the new Jira import experience

[#1]

Hello, Atlassian Community!

I am Varad Pingale, a product manager for Jira Platform.

We know that many businesses use multiple project management tools across their organization. This can lead to tooling sprawl, bloated costs, and inconsistent ways of working. To help our users better manage their software, we've built integrations that allow organizations to seamlessly consolidate third-party tools into their Jira Cloud via importers. With just a few clicks, you can consolidate disparate tools and empower your organization to:

• Increase productivity and collaboration

• Eliminate costs from underutilized tools, applications, and shadow IT

• Reduce management complexities

Today, we're thrilled to share the latest improvements to Jira imports! The new Jira import experience is refined to make importing work from project management tools into Jira easier, faster and more comprehensive. Compared to the Jira Import Wizard, Jira’s existing importer, the new import experience allows you to:

• Import from more tools: Import data from a more comprehensive selection of project management tools, including Airtable, Asana, Azure DevOps, ClickUp, GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Monday, Notion, Smartsheet, Trello, Wrike, and YouTrack.

• Import faster: Speed up data sorting and mapping for a faster time-to-value with new capabilities like filtering and automated field mapping.

• Import easier: Simplify the importing experience with new, user-friendly capabilities like customized import experiences and project creation.

Enterprise customers like Reddit state that the importer made ‘bringing things from existing services into Jira much easier…’ and enabled over $300,000 per year in savings on operational costs.

               

How does it work?

1. Export and Upload your data

Select the tool you want to import data from and follow the directions on the upload page to export data from the existing tool into a CSV file. If you can’t find your tool in the list of apps, you can still download a CSV file and prepare it as per our guidelines before you begin the import process. Then, upload the CSV file to begin the import process.

You can import data directly from Asana, ClickUp, monday, and Trello using APIs instead of a CSV file.

2. Set up your project

Name your Jira project and select the project type (business or software) and template (Kanban or Scrum). The importer will make recommendations based on your data.

3. Map your project fields

This is where transformative changes take place. Based on the tool you’re migrating from, the importer will automatically map CSV data to Jira fields, such as title, description, issue ID, and author. You can also filter by mapped and unmapped fields to ensure you’re importing all the information you need.

4. Add and move users

Invite new and existing users to join your project by adding their email addresses. You can also opt to import your data without adding users to your new project.

5. Review your project data and start import

After you’ve reviewed the summary of the data you’ll be importing, start the import and let us do the rest! You can continue working in Jira while the import is in progress, and we’ll send you an email once the import is complete.

What's next?

We will replace the Jira Import Wizard homepage with the new import homepage in early August 2024. Users with administration permissions will see this change by selecting Settings (⚙) > System > External system import. All users can still use Bulk Create to move issues using CSV by selecting Issues > More actions (⋯) > Import issues from CSV.

If you’d like to still use Jira Import Wizard, you can select Switch to the old experience to go back and use the features available there. We’ll eventually move to the new import experience, and we’ll keep you updated about any changes well in advance.

We will keep you updated as more capabilities are released for the new import experience!

Join the movement

With the new Jira import experience, you can quickly and easily consolidate work from your different project management tools into Jira Cloud. If you have used the new importer, we’d love to hear your success stories, answer any questions, or learn about your experience in the comments below.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Varad Pingale 

Thank you for this information.

How will this new import experience behave in regards to parent / child issue relationships, such as with the sunsetting of the Epic Link and Epic Name fields versus supporting the use of the Parent field for the relationships? 

I recall that currently for imports, a text value is still entered into the Epic Name field (when creating an epic) and the same value is then entered into the Epic Link field (when creating a child issue in the same import)...even though both of these fields are sunsetting.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Zalesak_ Stacy M]

Does the new import experience not allow you to update existing tickets?  I was hoping for an easer way to bulk update data on existing tickets in a given CSV file

[Felipe Luisi]

Hello @Varad Pingale . The current import wizard is critical infrastructure for us. We bulk upload plans of tasks (sometimes hundreds at a time) in the form of issues. A huge pain point we have had with this process is that only admins can bulk upload, because regular users cannot bulk upload across multiple projects. Furthermore, regular users cannot actively choose what issuetype in a project their bulk upload will go into, making the functionality absolutely useless. Thus, all plans have to be handed off to an admin first. 

We still don't have access to the new import wizard on our instance, but am I understanding correctly that this is ONLY for creating new projects, and will not allow us to bulk import plans of issuetypes anymore?

[Fernando Eugênio da Silva]

Hi @Varad Pingale , thanks for the news!

The new import structure seems very promising, but it still lacks some basic features that we have in the current version.

- Import issues via CSV to an existing project
- Update existing issues via CSV from an existing project.

For many teams, these features are now absolutely essential and need to be considered in the new version of import. Please consider these subjects to make available in the new import structure.

[Varad Pingale]

Hi @Fernando Eugênio da Silva  , @Zalesak_ Stacy M

Thanks for reaching out. 

Yes, we will be supporting the feature for importing issues via CSV into an existing project. 

We are also ideating on how we can include the "Update existing issues via CSV" feature into the new importer.

We will keep you posted for both these features.

[Varad Pingale]

Hi @Felipe Luisi 

Thanks for reaching out with the concern. We completely understand the importance of this tool in your daily tasks.

As you rightly pointed out, currently we are supporting only creation of new projects. 

It would be great if you could help me with understanding this better - "allow us to bulk import plans of issuetypes anymore?" Are you referring to bulk uploading CSVs with issues into multiple existing projects? Or is it something else? It would be great if you could share an example.

[Henrique Degan]

Hello @Varad Pingale 

I really liked the visualization and the architecture, but there is a problem that concerns me:

PUT ting to existing projects is not available, which is of utmost importance for organizations.

I think this issue should be considered.

[Pablo Culebras [Jodocus.io]]

Hi @Varad Pingale,

We extensively use the CSV importer for our customer's cloud migrations. CMAs do not support some data types and we use it to update the migrated issues with the missing information.

Do you have a public roadmap for the upcoming features?

Also, do you have any infos on the JSON importer. It just went AWOL.

Kind regards,
Pablo

[tom.hawkins]

Hello Varad, thanks for the info, a couple of things: 1. Is Switch to the old experience  already available to all customers? As per your ref JST-1030098 (thanks Himanshi Dixit for sending us here!) our ref ATL-1038, it seems like we haven't been fully rolled out yet but HAVE lost the old functionality, unless my colleague Srivatsa and I have missed how to access the  Switch to the old experience option? Seems strange that a rollout would take away the old experience BEFORE rolling out the ability to switch back to it, but stranger things have happened! 2. Like Fernando and some others here, the main motivation for Switch to the old experience is the lack so far of "Import issues via CSV to an existing project" and we would also benefit from "Update existing issues via CSV from an existing project." please let us know if there is a feature request we can vote for? 3. Personally I quite like the restriction that only admins can bulk upload as don't want our users getting overexcited and running too many bulk uploads leaving a mess of duplicates etc., so if you do end up deviating from this for Felipe(and I can see why it would be desirable) please consider allowing admins to enable / disable ability for non-admins to bulk upload