Work'n It: Integrating Jira, Confluence, Slack, Outlook, and Teams

[Randy O_Neal]

At Twinspires, we live and breathe collaboration, with our primary artery these days being Slack.  If it doesn't happen in Slack, maybe it's in Outlook.  Teams is rapidly becoming a fierce competitor to Outlook... the assumption is if it's not in a chat within Slack or Teams, it's probably an email sitting in Outlook (as one of my co-workers likes to say, "I can't believe people still use email!", lol).

We use automation to notify people when issues have been moved to a particular state.  For example, we have automation in place to notify our Product Owner that an issue has been marked Done and is ready to be reviewed for acceptance.  We have other teams who have similar automations to send emails when various issues have moved to a particular state.  And - of course - we have Confluence pages we're watching with interest... and we receive either weekly summaries, daily summaries, or up-to-date alerts when those pages are updated.  As we leverage our Confluence dashboards to help manage our teams, we have executives who watch certain pages for updates, which alert them to updates to our metrics; this way, they become aware of updates which may pique their interests.

To date, we've not attempted anything per se with Teams; it's still further down the stack than our focus at the moment.

As we strive to deepen our integrations between Jira and Confluence with Slack, Outlook, and Teams, we are constantly on the lookout for the next best thing.  What are you leveraging in your domains?

[Summer.Hogan]

Thanks for sharing this info @Randy O_Neal!

[Britta Neugebauer _yasoon_]

Working in a Microsoft Teams first environment, I really don't miss emails 😅 Thank you for sharing @Randy O_Neal !

[Thierry Dalon]

Just some food for thoughts. I am not much a fan about notifications and prefer a pull vs a push approach.

I mean, I prefer to check actively for issues that need my consideration e.g. via a dashboards or dedicated filters.

Also I think for example using some kind of regular meeting to share which issue needs the attention from others is useful. (A Kanban board will help for this)

Notifications sounds to me more like information overload and hard to handle especially if you send them one-by-one (not bundled).

I like to subscribe to custom filters to get a weekly bundle of specific information. Creating filter for information is not a very much known approach / best practice, I think.

To summarize: my point is: think about reducing/ better controlling notifications vs. automating them.

In Outlook I also use Rules to filter this kind of Email notifications not to have my Inbox cluttered by them. (I move them to a Low Prio folder)

If a Task is important I expect to be informed about it personally.