Extension for Jira Service Desk is the most wanted feature bundle for this Atlassian software. It improves security, usability and appearance of the solution to help teams around the globe provide top-notch customer support. The app allows to display more issue details on the Customer Portal, set up permissions for various elements and build dynamic request forms, to name a few of its recognised features. Recently, we’ve released version 6.0 with increased performance, more capabilities and improvements added. Here’s a short review of this update.
To help you set Extension up and running faster, we’ve added the Get Started page, which appears immediately after you install the app. On this page, you can find short descriptions of its key features and links to their respective global configurations. More of these links are available on the side panel of the Add-ons section, and project-specific configurations are situated under the Project settings.
The first link directs you to the configuration of our newest feature, Organizations and Groups Sync. This one was originally a custom request by one of our clients, just like it had been with some other key features of the app (check out MetLife case study to dig into the history). The company had their customers assigned to user groups in Jira, so they needed the possibility to link those with the Organizations automatically. It was a smart idea, so we decided to add this feature to the commercial version of Extension for Jira Service Desk.
There are two types of configuration available. By adding Jira user groups to Organizations, you choose an Organization, which must be created beforehand, and the user groups you’d like to add to it. You can add multiple groups to one Organization, and not vice versa. All the users from the selected groups will be added to the Organization automatically.
The second method allows to create Organizations directly from user groups in the projects you select, with all the users assigned to them automatically. The Organization name then will be the same as the user group name. Please note that here you provide the user groups that you want to exclude from the synchronization process.
After you set up, all that’s left is to provide a synchronization interval and enable it. You can perform the sync manually at any moment by clicking the Sync now button.
If it comes to well-known Dynamic Forms, the first good news is that we’ve added support for Multi Select, Cascading Select, Checkbox and Radio Button field types. This dramatically increases the app’s capabilities in terms of form building. But the main change is the revamped configuration panel which structures your options and fields, making the setup process much easier. From now on, clicking the + sign and choosing a field is all it takes to add it to the configuration. If you need a new custom field, there’s a link on the dialog window that will take you to the Custom fields section.
There are two configuration possibilities with this one, too. The Global configuration is at the Add-ons section – there, you configure the fields shared across all your Jira Service Desk projects. You can disable a configuration with the Dynamic Forms toggle – it will be saved as a draft and still available for later use, though. The Project configuration is available under the Project settings → Extension → Dynamic Forms section. You can use the global settings there, or turn them off and configure the field specifically for the given project. There’s also a link at the Global Configuration to go to a Project one – simply by choosing the appropriate project on the dialog window.
For Bundled Fields, which is also one of the latest app’s features, we’ve added a possibility to specify the default number of rows for every field, support for the Date Picker field type, and exporting these fields to the .xml format. Now Bundled Fields are extremely convenient for storing billing and delivery addresses, if your customers make purchases via Jira Service Desk.
Another improvement is the JQL searcher issues in bundledFieldsEx. Using it, you can filter issues in which a specific Bundled Field appears, having a certain value stored in it. You can specify a sub-field by adding the third argument: for example, issues in bundledFieldsEx (‘Billing Address’, ‘Delivery Date’, ‘2018-05-30’) will return you all the purchase requests with a specified delivery date. We’ve added the same searcher to the Dynamic Forms for Jira standalone app, which appears there as issues in bundledFieldsDf.