JIRA Service Desk add ons

[Sue McKinlay]

We use the simple JIRA Service Desk for our ticketing tool.  We are looking for suggestions for add ons to make the product more robust (help with filling in data - templates, better workflow, managing tasks instead of individual tickets)

We have a number of our faculty and business areas using the product for their ticketing system, and we are looking for more optimal functionality for ticket coordination, automation and improvements.

Would anyone be able to recommend what they use in addition to the vanilla JIRA SD product and why.

Thanks,

Sue 

[Jimmy Van (GLiNTECH)]

Hi Sue,

Great question but also a how long is a piece of string question :) (Disclaimer, I'm an Atlassian partner.)

Firstly, Automation for Jira is necessary for any Jira Service Desk instance. Sure, there's in built JSD automation, but Automation for Jira is easier to use, provides more actions (send message to Slack/Teams) and a much better audit trail to debug your rules. This will be your best investment by far.

Secondly, Insight Asset Management. While typically it does lend itself towards IT assets (laptops, servers), I have helped many non-IT teams with their service desk with Insight. If you have rich data in Active Directory, you can tap into this by pulling the data into Insight and providing them with contextual information, e.g. only computers the reporter owns, only facilities the office manager belongs to, etc. (Note that this recommendation is for Server/DC only; Cloud is new and has a little while to come before it is as powerful).

Thirdly, check out the Deviniti suite of tools. They've got a bunch of great ones. Extension for Jira Service Desk allows you to show/hide fields on a dynamic basis, while Issue Templates pre-populates data - gives you the templates that you're after. Actions for Jira Service Desk is also often helpful, to allow end users to update their requests after they've done submitted their request, instead of leaving comments for an agent to pick up.

In terms of coordinating tickets, it depends on what you want to do. Automation for Jira should be able to help with balanced workloads, otherwise check out Elevator. I haven't recommended much for workflows, as Automation for Jira will do most of what you want. If you want to police workflows (conditions, validators, etc), I can recommend some things, but it depends on how fancy/technical you want to get.

Best to chat to your local Atlassian partner.

Hope that helps,
Jimmy