This is a guest post from Daniel Wester, co-founder of Wittified LLC. Check them out on the Atlassian Marketplace.
Administering Jira, Confluence, Stash, or another Atlassian product can sometimes seem like a thankless job. As an admin you have a number of responsibilities: training new users, providing best practices, and continually evaluating add-ons and product upgrades to see if they will meet your organization’s needs. That’s on top of serving as the first line of support for people that run into trouble.
In my experience as an administrator, all these day-to-day tasks ate into my time. It felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again, and monotony quickly leads to feeling unproductive. Enter the Atlassian Marketplace! You might have already used the Marketplace to purchase add-ons to extend your existing Atlassian products based on requests from users in your organization.
But what about your work?
In addition to all the great add-ons to make more of Jira and Confluence, there’s an array of tools to make administering the product easier. Here are a few of my favorites from my time as an admin:
- Script Runner is a must-have plugin for scripting repeated actions.
- Bob Swift’s CLI add-ons allow you to run common administrative actions directly from the command line.
- SU plugins from the Plugin People allow you to quickly switch users so you can see what users in your organization see in their account.
- User Management Utility from Artemis Software helps you update hundred or thousands of user accounts at once and export to CSV files.
At Wittified, we love admins. So we’ve built a few of our own tools to help administrators at companies of any size.
- Project Creator for Jira –With Project Creator, you can create “project templates” with components, versions, project role schemes, and more, then delegate the actual creation of projects to certain user groups in your organization. This means less time spent creating similar projects over and over on behalf of your users. Delegate the details of setting up each project for a different team, and spend your concentrating on coming up with a standardized set of project configurations that fits your organization.
- Announcer – One of the biggest issues that administrators face is how to communicate critical information (maintenance windows, new features, etc.) out to all the users in their organization. The larger the organization, the more of a challenge this becomes. We built Announcer (available for Jira, Confluence and Stash) to solve this problem. With Announcer, you can create announcements in many different ways: dialogs, banners, and full-page interstitials that require users to acknowledge them. Admins get reports on how many of the users have acknowledged the announcement and who those users are!
- Project Notifications Editor for Jira – Spending a lot of time sitting down with project owners and editing notifications schemes? Project Notifications Editor gives project owners complete control of their projects’ notification schemes.
So how’s your admin doing?
Jira administrators are busy people. Find the tools that let you focus on the important things in the Atlassian Marketplace. If you’re an admin, get started on the Atlassian Marketplace. If you’re not, go give your friendly admin a hug! (just make sure it’s ok with HR)