The JIRA plus app

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Work better with your engineering team with the new and advanced Atlassian Jira plus app. The seamless two-way connection between Freshdesk and Jira ensures that your agents and the engineering team can collaborate effortlessly. Your engineering team will have clear visibility of customer requests and issues, and your customers get better and faster support. Get a 360-degree view of every issue for efficient issue resolution.

In this article, we’ll talk about 

• Things we can do with the integration
• How to install the app?
• How does the integration work in Freshdesk and in JIRA?

Here are some things you can do with the integration:

• Associate support tickets with issues in JIRA for bugs, feature requests, etc. 
• Customize the JIRA fields you want to show in Freshdesk.
• Create JIRA issues from your Freshdesk account and link one or more Freshdesk tickets to a JIRA issue.
• Give engineers a complete view of all customer conversations related to an issue
• Here are some of the ‘Sync’ activities that you do with this integration:

-Sync comments- Have the support team and engineers communicate in real-time using notes and comments

-Sync priorities- Prioritize issues in JIRA based on the severity of impact on your customers

-Sync ticket and issue status- Keep agents and customers updated based on the progress of an issue on JIRA
-Sync Freshdesk fields with Custom JIRA text fields- View more information in JIRA by mapping custom JIRA text fields to Freshdesk fields such as Source, Group, Agent, Freshdesk Ticket Number, Freshdesk Ticket URL, Customer Name, Customer Email Address, Customer Phone number, and Company Name.

• Add tags to the Freshdesk ticket whenever a JIRA issue is created or linked so that it can be easier to filter, fetch and track issues in Freshdesk
• Search JIRA issues within Freshdesk using the text given in ‘Summary’, or with the JIRA issue number. 
• Create JIRA issues with the group, label, and other properties that can be auto-filled and auto-completed without having to fill manually
• View and access the inline images which are part of Freshdesk tickets, directly in the JIRA issue (Note: Maximum size of images allowed is 10MB)
• View Freshdesk tickets that are linked to a JIRA ticket in the sidebar next to the corresponding JIRA issue
• Customize the Freshdesk ticket information you see in JIRA
• Freshdesk tickets can be found in the ‘Freshdesk for JIRA’ tab in JIRA.
• Customize the Freshdesk ticket information you see in JIRA.
• Expand any ticket to view all conversations between the customer and the support team as well as all relevant ticket information
• Sync and Map comments, issue status, etc with Freshdesk in JIRA
• Edit comments in JIRA and view the updated notes inside the Freshdesk ticket

How to Install the Jira App?

The JIRA integration for Freshdesk supports both cloud and on-premise variants, from version 7.0 up to the latest version. 

1. Log in to Freshdesk as Admin.
2. On the top-right corner, click on the Marketplace app icon.
   
3. You can find the Atlassian Jira Plus app under Popular Apps. Alternatively, you can click on the Marketplace Apps option and directly go to the Apps section to search for the app.

Step 1: Freshdesk Account Configuration
Enter your Freshdesk URL and your API key. This guide will help you find your API key.

Step 2: General Settings
Choose how you want to sync updates between your Jira and Freshdesk. 

Choose whether you want to sync the inline image in the Freshdesk ticket description and other attachments between Freshdesk and JIRA using the toggle as shown below:

Step 3:  Freshdesk Account Configuration

• Under ‘Jira account configuration’, enter your JIRA domain URL, email address, and API key. You can generate your API token here and verify your JIRA account. (If you are using on-premise JIRA, can make the JIRA domain public by downloading ngrok.
  
  

• Once you verify your account, you can choose the Jira fields and projects that need to be visible to your Freshdesk support agents while linking Freshdesk tickets to issues in Jira. 

• If you are installing the JIRA app for the first time, you can choose specific Freshdesk ticket fields that are required to be displayed in JIRA once a ticket is linked to JIRA. If you are already using ‘Freshdesk for JIRA’ app, you have to select these fields from the settings of the ‘Freshdesk for JIRA’ app  (Note: If the fields are not chosen, the integration will still be successful but the information will not be displayed efficiently in JIRA) 
  
  
• You can then specify how want the statuses, priorities, and fields of Freshdesk tickets and Jira issues to be synced and click on install

Step 4: Installing ‘Freshdesk for JIRA App’ in JIRA
Once the Atlassian of JIRA plus App is installed, install Freshdesk for JIRA in Atlassian JIRA from here. This app is not available for On-Premise accounts. (Note: With the latest JIRA<>Freshdesk enhancement, you just have to install the JIRA app within Freshdesk once, and the app will be automatically installed at the JIRA’s end without manual installation again)
To restrict firewall access for Freshdesk to connect successfully to your JIRA server, please add an exception for the following VPC IPs based on your Freshdesk account's location

How does the JIRA integration work?

In Freshdesk

When a customer contacts the support team about a product bug or a feature request, you can either create a new issue or link tickets to an existing issue. When a new issue is created, the support team will be able to edit JIRA columns.

You can link the ticket to an existing issue, by searching for the subject searching for the summary or the ID of the issue

The Jira issue ID gets added as a tag on your Freshdesk ticket as soon as it’s linked to one or more JIRA issues. 

In JIRA

Engineers will be able to view details of the customer tickets linked to an issue.

You can choose to have up to ten Freshdesk ticket fields made visible in Jira. To view these fields, select the fields from the app settings of the ‘Freshdesk for JIRA’ app in JIRA. ‘Freshdesk for JIRA’  app can be installed from here

Note: This is not available for on-prem JIRA accounts

Syncing properties between Freshdesk and JIRA

You can sync properties in Freshdesk and JIRA in different ways depending on your team’s workflow. 

Status sync

You can choose to have your custom statuses on Freshdesk mapped to the issue status on JIRA 

Priority sync

The priorities - low, medium, high and urgent in Freshdesk and JIRA can be mapped with the statuses on JIRA. This way, you can have product issues prioritized based on the impact on your customers. 

Field Sync

• You can choose to map Freshdesk fields such as Source, Group, Agent, Freshdesk Ticket Number, Freshdesk Ticket URL, Customer Name, Customer Email Address, Customer Phone number, and Company Name to any custom JIRA text field.
• The custom JIRA text fields managed by both Team and Company projects can be mapped to the fields from Freshdesk. You can sync Freshdesk fields to multiple projects.
• The name of the project will be displayed in the bracket following the JIRA filed name (Note: The mandatory Custom JIRA fields cannot be mapped for now)
  
  

Adding comments on JIRA 

You can choose to have a comment added on JIRA issues when an agent adds a private note or updates the status of a ticket. This way, support teams can have engineers updated on the status of the customer issue. 

Updating Freshdesk agents and customers

When an issue is updated on JIRA, agents can be notified using a private note. Alternatively, you can update customers by adding a public note or sending an email to them directly.  As an example, as soon as a product bug is marked as resolved in JIRA, your customers can be notified via email.