Using the location of a Jira user

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In numerous use cases in Jira the Location of a user can be of good use, like when:

• Employees requesting tangibles like routers, laptops, accessories

• Delivering books, flowers, office supplies

• Automatically tag the Jira issue with office, city, country of the reporters to produce reports on these parameters and analyse trends in IT, Quality, HR processes etc

In this article I will focus on the first use case to show how we can connect data from Azure AD and fetch the Location based on a Jira user of a particular issue to make this request run smoothly and more accurately.

Extend Jira with org data from Azure AD or Google Workspace

If you are on Jira SM Cloud Premium or higher you have access to the Asset functionality which offer capability to connect and utilise data in your Jira issues.

In Asset you can create an Asset Schema to hold structured master data. You add object types for users, departments, roles, locations and any other object types that is important information for your company and your Jira processes. You connect objects together with inbound and outbound links. Below is an example of an object schema with relations between the object types.

This data, however, tend to be collected, quality assured and stored in an external source, like Azure AD (Entra ID) or Google Workspace. If this is the case for you, using an importer app to mirror what is in the external master source is a better option. It will save loads of time to get going, as the importer app is creating the structure in Assets from the data model in the source and the data will be updated on the interval of your choice.

Connecting the asset user object with Jira user

When we seek to connect Jira requests made by Jira users with master data in Assets, an important piece of the puzzle is to add a Jira user attribute to the Users object. Follow the instructions in this article to connect the Asset object user with the Jira user with an automation.

Example case “Request new Hardware”

In the below case we want to order a laptop for a user that is stationed in the Town Centre office in San Diego.

In my “Request new Hardware” form I have added an Asset custom field, that allows the reporter to choose amongst the device models that are offered in this company (check out this article for more details on adding an Asset custom fields).

Serve Agents with employee data on the Jira issue

I want to present the agent with the shipping address of the requester.

One way of doing this is to present the Agent with more detail about the Employee requesting the device through

1. Create an Asset custom field, in the example I called it “Involved Employee”

2. Add an automation that triggers on Issue creation that will populate the “Involved Employee” field based on the reporter field.

Depending on the needs of the agent we choose what attribute to display in the drop down box.

Present shipment address on the Jira Issue

Taking it one step further where the agent don’t need to look for the shipping information in the Employee Field, we instead want to fetch the shipping address and present it in a text field.

1. Create a text field for the address to ship to, in my examples below I call it “Shipment Address”

2. Add an automation that fetches the attributes of the Employee and its linked objects and put that together in the “Shipment Address” text field

In the example automation below I fetch attributes Name, Company, Street address, City and Country. Since both City and Country are objects themselves I need to fetch their object names (otherwise it will just post the key of the object)

{{lookupObjects.Name}}, {{lookupObjects.Company Name}}, {{lookupObjects.Street Address}}, {{lookupObjects.City Name.Name}}, {{lookupObjects.Country Name.Name}}

This way we present a text that can be used when shipping the device.

Find suitable warehoused devices

Sometimes laptops and other devices are warehoused or recirculated for speedy delivery. I want to serve the Agent with the option to pick an already exiting Laptop.

To do this our two Object Schemas “Azure AD” (where we hold organisational data) and “InTune” (where we hold devices) needs to collaborate. We don’t want to duplicate data and have two lists of Locations that can get out of sync.

1. For the Managed Device Object Type in InTune schema, add an attribute called Location. Choose Attribute Type Object to connect the attribute to the Location objects stored in the Azure AD Schema.

2. Ensure your Managed Devices have a Location set. The objects missing an owner are your warehoused items.

3. Create an Asset custom field, I called this “Suggested Device”. This will present a filtered lists of devices that have no owner.

Here you can choose to make the filter very open and find objects where owner is empty and leave the issue filtering blank. That means the list will present every single device that have no owner regardless of Location. That might suit the smaller company.

You can choose to be a little bit more specific and use the filter issue scope to narrow down to only find available items of the requested model. The user chose a model in field “Device Model Choice” (in my site it has customfieldId 10307) and we are using the data in that field to filter out matching objects in our Suggested Devices field.

If you are a large company with many locations you may want to be even more specific and use the issue filter scope to narrow down the list of devices to the correct requested model and objects that are warehoused on same location as the employee stored in the “Involved employee” field.

Locations of your employees can be utilised in many different use cases. Getting this data into Jira will unlock the potential to save time and increase accuracy in managing different kinds of requests or issues in Jira.

best regards

Lisa

Other articles on a similar topics:

Improve Order requests with assets and automations 
How to use Assets and JSM for Reporting Broken Hardware