Smart Attachments plug-in is very useful and amazing software when integrated with JIRA.
Smart Attachments combine a lot of features found in different software in one plug-in, also their team is very professional and resolve any issue/inquiry in short time and this is personal experience with them.
Hany Reda
Our customer is the government authority of Bahrain that is developing government systems and applications including e-services on their online portal. This portal provides individuals and business solution partners with the wide range of services including but not limited to the following:
- business and trade
- community welfare
- education
- employment
- health, safety, and environment
- housing and property
- legislation and courts
- personal documents
- utilities and infrastructure
Jira: to be or not to be?
The government authority of Bahrain is actively developing the eGovernment portal and extending it with the functions requested by citizens of Bahrain and business units of the country.
They have been using Jira for planning, task management, and tracking requests and service incidents for about 6 years. Jira Software from Atlassian was not an accidental choice. It has proved to be one of the best solutions on the market due to its great flexibility and unlimited extensibility through the variety of apps distributed on the Atlassian Marketplace.
Additionally, our customer designed a project template that was widely used by different teams for project management in their Jira.
A better way to handle attachments
With all the advancements bundled with Jira, there is one problem with it. Jira does not provide the sufficient functionality for efficient management of attachments in issues. The customer wanted to improve the visibility of document versions and simplify the overall user experience with files in Jira.
After evaluation of multiple attachment management solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, the customer decided to choose our Smart Attachments app. It included most features they needed for managing attachments in their projects and provided the required integration with Jira interfaces, so representatives of the customer were able to perform all the necessary operations on attachments while browsing through projects, issues, viewing issue details, or managing issues for a new sprint on the board.
Configuration of attachment categories
The customer has created a set of categories for storing documents that are produced at each phase of project development, as follows:
- Initiation
- Planning
- Executing
- Monitoring & Controlling
- Closing
- Requirements
- Contracts
- Logs
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Each category was intended to store project artifacts created for each opened initiative for introducing updates into the eGovernment portal and the related CRM System.
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This way, the Initiation category was used for storing documents with business cases, the Planning category for keeping project and development plans and roadmaps, the other categories for storing other types of plans, artifacts, and development documents.
Upon the issue creation, the responsible person uploads a plenty of documents in each category. These documents are further edited and updated in Jira by the team members.
The customer also configured visibility of some categories only in specific issue types. In such a way they do not show categories where they are unnecessary.
To avoid accidental access to specific documents by users who are not intended to view them, the customer has defined the access restrictions. They hide the entire category with all documents stored within it.
Document versioning in Jira
Our customer needed a more transparent way to store revisions of documents. The generic document usually undergoes through a series of edits with the following upload of each revision into the related Jira issue.
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The Smart Attachments app supplied them with an easy way to keep all the revisions under the parent document. When expanding the document, they can quickly locate the appropriate version and review it if needed.
Workflow automations in use
Our customer used the workflow that required validation of availability of specific documents in categories when the issue transition is performed. First of all, this was required to verify that the Initiation category contained the files required to start work on the initiative. Here they applied the Category not empty validator.
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On other steps of the workflow, they also verify documents by the specific file name. Now when users transition issues to another state, they can instantly receive a notification that a required document is missing in the issue.
The another use where our app helped the customer was a necessity to send attachments from the Initiation category to the project manager. So this person can start review of the initiative without accessing the corresponding Jira issue.
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Challenges and benefits
The Smart Attachments app allowed the customer to better integrate management of attachments into their project and portfolio management system and address the following challenges:
- Management of different projects’ attachments in an easy and efficient way in Jira Software.
- Management of documents having multiple revisions appearing after their continuous edits throughout project phases.
- Validation of required documents by name at each phase or in each process throughout their workflows.
Our customer has gained the following benefits from using our app:
- No need to integrate with other systems to handle and browse documents. Users can interact with attachments and documents through the user-friendly screens.
- No need to invest into development of integration with document management software or customize the existing business processes for dealing with attachments.
We are looking forward to cooperation with this customer in the future. We also continue development of the app and plan to deliver new and useful features for attachment management in Jira in the next releases of the Smart Attachments app.