Five Most Useful Add-ons of Atlassian Codegeist 2016
Every year Atlassian provides developers with an excellent opportunity to improve Atlassian products with some useful features and tools. And the name of this opportunity is Atlassian Codegeist hackathon. This contest allows developers from all over the world to transform their ideas and visions into real improvements for JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, or Bitbucket.
We at StiltSoft sincerely love Atlassian Codegeist! And it’s not only because we won Codegeist 2015 with our File Viewer for Bitbucket Cloud add-on and our Awesome Graphs became Runner-up add-on in 2012. We love Codegeist for the challenging opportunities, fresh ideas, and competitive spirit.
Now the hackathon is over and it’s high time to look through its results. This year’s competition had 932 participants, 116 submissions, and 7 winners. The list of winners looks like:
- Popular choice: StepShot for Confluence
- Top cloud integration: Workato Integrations for Atlassian
- Best for business teams: Hootsuite for JIRA Service Desk
- Top software team add-on: Easy Agile Roadmaps for JIRA
- Top IT team add-on: Automation for JIRA Cloud
- Best newcomer add-on: Elevator for JIRA: Escalate your Issues
- Top Data Center add-on: PII Protector for JIRA
For this blog post we picked up five add-ons of Codegest 2016. We assume that the majority of our blog readers can take advantage of these tools. So here’s our Top 5 list:
- Canned Responses by Spartez
- Comala Approvals by Comalatech
- DocuSign by Praecipio Consulting
- Scroll WP Publisher by k15t Labs
- To-Do Bot by Zlapps
1. Canned Responses
Canned Responses add-on is the adaptation of the server add-on to the Cloud platform. This add-on from Spartez team is a tool for different teams that can find its applicability in their everyday collaboration in JIRA. How does it work? Canned Responses provides you with capabilities to prepare sets of reusable response templates for JIRA comments.
With this add-on you can easily insert the required template when commenting in JIRA. You can use the contextual automatic data population for every issue in your JIRA. For more information check the documentation.
Let’s see some features of Canned Response for JIRA Cloud add-on:
- Visibility scopes: personal, global and per project.
- Integration with all JIRA editions.
- Fields for automatic population in the template: e.g. reporter, assignee, issue key, project key, etc. (including custom fields).
Once you have selected the required template, the add-on will automatically replace the macro snippets with their actual issue values. You can also edit these template’s dynamic parameters after their population.
This add-on supplies you with functionality that allows you to keep consistency of your comments and save a bit of your team’s time on other activities.
Pricing of this add-on for JIRA Cloud is 25$/month for 25 users, 50$/month for 50 users, 100$/month for 100 users. You can try it right now.
2. Comala Approvals
It’s not a secret that Atlassian Confluence is a great tool for project planning, team collaboration, user documentation and knowledge base management. And sometimes Confluence is used when you need to prepare some documentation subject to approval of specific users. That’s when you may try Comala Approvals add-on.
This add-on for Confluence Cloud helps users to maintain the expected quality and relevance of your Confluence documents with reviews and approvals. It allows you:
- to assign approvers:
- to approve or reject pages:
- and to check the approval status of your pages:
You can also get approval notifications directly in your team’s HipChat room:
Pricing of Comala Approvals add-on for Confluence Cloud is 25$/month for 25 users, 50$/month for 50 users, 75$/month for 100 users.
3. DocuSign
DocuSign for Confluence Server allows you to create, send, and track electronic signature of documents within Confluence using DocuSign Envelopes. A DocuSign Envelope is a container used to send one or more documents for signature using the DocuSign system. Envelopes can contain multiple documents and can be sent to several recipients.
To organize your work with electronic signature documents, just follow a few simple steps:
- Create documents in Confluence with DocuSign macros.
- Create your DocuSign envelope in Confluence when you’re ready to send the document.
- Then just track the status (created, sent) of each your DocuSign envelope.
To meet all the business requirements and specifications, DocuSign add-on complies with the following standards:
- FDA
- SOX
- HIPAA
- CFR Part 11
If you need the features of DocuSign in your JIRA – you can check DocuSign for JIRA and further automate your eSignature process.
The price of DocuSign add-on for Confluence is 480$ for 25 users, 880$ for 50 users, 1600$ for 100 users.
4. Scroll WP Publisher
Meet one more Confluence Cloud add-on from Atlassian Codegeist 2016!
With Scroll WP Publisher add-on you can directly publish your content created in Confluence (blog posts, news, announcements) to your blog at WordPress.com. But you need to know that this add-on allows you to work only with WordPress.com, not with any custom blog powered by WordPress CMS.
How does it work?
You just create a new page with content in your Confluence, save it and then click the WordPress Publish State link located to the right side of the page title.
So, with Scroll WP Publisher you can combine powerful capabilities of the two platforms: Atlassian Confluence for content creation and WordPress.com for publishing updates to your blog.
Scroll WP Publisher is free for Confluence Cloud. Try it!
5. To-Do Bot
If you’re looking for the way to fuse conversation and work into a single efficient mechanism – To-Do Bot add-on for HipChat is right for you. It allows you to keep your team conversation and small tasks in HipChat rather than in JIRA spamming issues with hundreds of comments and sub-tasks. Creating a visible to-do list in a HipChat room is a great way to keep focus during any conversation.
How does the add-on work?
To-Do Bot add-on keeps track of all to-do lists in your HipChat rooms. With To-Do Bot each room has its own to-do list that only the room participants can view and update. You can create as many tasks as you want, assign them to your peers, set priorities, due dates, get reminders and mark them as completed once you’ve done them. So it’s a simple and powerful task management tool for HipChat.
Tasks can be created right inside the room, using the ‘/todo command’ or by selecting ‘New to-do task’ in [+] contextual menu:
You can see how many tasks are in the list any time you want. The list updates every time when any room participant makes a change.
To-Do Bot is a free add-on for HipChat. No registration needed, just add it to your HipChat room and you’re ready to start!
As you can see Atlassian Codegeist is an extremely challenging contest that motivates developers to reappraise the existing user experience in Atlassian ecosystem and create new useful add-ons that will bring collaboration and development efficiency to a new level.
Note that we publish our quarterly series of posts “Top 5 add-ons for Atlassian products” in this blog. Right now you can check out our Top 5 add-ons for JIRA, Confluence and Dev Tools for the third quarter of 2016. If you want to get the timely updates on this series of posts, just fill your email in the subscription form below: