Search, Filter, and Delete Attachments in Jira Software

June 15, 2023
#Project management#Document management#Reporting#How To#Jira
12 min

Stiltsoft, in conjunction with Atlassian, continues to roll out tools and functionalities for all teams. Many teams use Atlassian Jira Software to manage projects, create roadmaps, and upload project artifacts. Our Smart Attachments for Jira app facilitates file management. If you are new to Jira project management software, this blog post will guide you on everything you need to know, starting with Jira Cloud features. Also, we will discuss how to search, filter, and delete attachments in projects and issues efficiently. Read this post to learn how to use Jira Cloud and manage attachments in Jira Software.

Features of Jira Project Management Software

Seamless Project Management

Project management gets a lot easier with Jira. The software gives a clear direction for project creation. Jira Software helps you house different boards, issues, ideas, or attachments under a project to aid better project management. This way, you can create, organize, and monitor projects in one place.

Seamless project management

Ready-to-Use Templates

As you work within Jira Software, you have various pre-made templates for different teams or projects. You do not have to build or create anything from scratch; the templates have every feature you need. Today Jira has 15 templates for teams and activities in software development, legal affairs, IT, analytics, or human resources. So any team, be it an experienced crowd of professionals or a startup with enthusiasts, can find the template to kick off their project in Jira.

Jira project templates based on how similar teams work.

Clear Roadmaps

With a clear roadmap, it becomes easy to reach your project goals. Jira Software helps you map work processes, view project dependencies, and identify bottlenecks. The advanced roadmap feature enables you to create several roadmap versions, track project progress, and make more brilliant plans.

Jira roadmaps

Atlassian Marketplace Integrations

Atlassian has enriched its Marketplace with apps that will accelerate project processes and make your job easier. It has numerous apps for different purposes, which you can integrate with your Jira Cloud instance.

App categories in the marketplace include customer relationship management (CRM), code review, design, sales, charts & diagramming, and many more. You can navigate across solutions on the Atlassian Marketplace with the help of its quick filters, keyword search, or by combining them.

Atlassian Marketplace Integrations

Project Insights

Jira Software provides you with real-time insights about your projects. These insights will help you make data-informed decisions to move your projects forward and grow your team and company.

You can find the list of available reports from the project sidebar. Locate Reports and select the one you need for your analytics.

Project Insights

Pros and Cons of Jira Software

Teams love Jira for many reasons:

  1. Apps from Atlassian Marketplace are easy to add to your account. You do not need Jira or an in-house tech support team to integrate a new solution.
  2. Jira helps enterprises to scale and make data-informed decisions through Jira reports & analytics. It also helps companies stay compliant with regulatory policies on security.
  3. The software has a free pricing plan for small teams.

The things you need to consider:

  1. The free pricing plan is limited in functionality. It does not have data analytics and user roles & permissions features. The Standard and Premium pricing plans offer only a 7-day free trial each.
  2. Many solutions on the Atlassian Marketplace require additional payment. In return, you get not only the software itself but also regular app updates, new feature releases, and responsive support.

Basics of Attachment Management in Jira Cloud

Here, we shall discuss how to improve file management using the Smart Attachments for Jira Cloud app. Below are the three major steps to get the app from the Atlassian Marketplace.

  1. Sign up to create a Jira Software account or sign in to your account.
    Sign up
  2. On the start page, you will be redirected to your dashboard. If you already use other Atlassian products like Trello and Confluence, you will see a list of these products, including Jira, which you just signed up on. Click Jira Software to go to your Jira instance.
  3. Create a project. To do this, go to the header and click Project. Below the drop-down that comes up, select Create Project.
  4. On your dashboard, go to the header and click Apps. Next, click Explore more apps and search for Smart Attachments for Jira. Click on the app and add it to your account. Now you can manage attachments in your project issues.

Attachments in Jira Software: Pro Tips

While executing projects and tasks, teams often have documents with which they work. These documents could be interviews, research, briefs, and pictures for flawless project completion.
As your team collaborates on Jira Software, uploading these documents as attachments for concerned persons to access is necessary. This looks like the basic workflow without any concerns. Things change once your project issues get way too many files attached to issues. It becomes difficult to operate this hip of documents. Here comes our Smart Attachments with the ability to filter, group, search, or delete bulk attachments in Jira.

How to Organize Attachments in Jira Issues

The app is ready to use immediately after the install. You can start with labeling your attachments in Jira issues to keep them organized.

Open the Jira issue with attachments. To label an attachment, move to the sidebar and click Open Smart Attachments.

Open Smart Attachments

Move your cursor over the attachment you want to label to reveal +. Click the + button and type in your label. Click Create <Insert label> (New label). If you want to use an existing label, click + and select the label from your list. The labeled attachments will then become color-coded.

Create labels

You can also select to enable the Smart Attachments panel in your issue view by default. Navigate to the app project settings and turn on the toggle there.

How to Group Attachments in Jira Software

Appropriate labels work fine for document classification and clarity. Once your Jira files are labeled, go on to organize them.

There are three ways to group Jira attachments in your project issues. You can group by label, uploader, and upload date. To group your attachments you need to:
1.Locate the Smart Attachments panel.
3.Click and select your group choice.

Attachment grouping

How to Perform Bulk Operations on Attachments in Jira Software

Have you ever felt frustrated deleting files in Jira Cloud one by one? Routine operations can be quite annoying as they look like a simple waste of time. The Smart Attachments app has a magic wand for this use case. You can save time with bulk operations on your Jira attachments.

To manage files in Jira issues in bulk, you need to:

  1. Move your cursor over attachments to reveal checkboxes.
  2. Tick the checkboxes and scroll down to Operation.
  3. Select the bulk operation – Add labels, Replace labels, Remove labels, or Delete attachments.

Bulk operations

How to Search for Issues with Attachments

If you have multiple issues in a project, it can be overwhelming to look through them all manually just in search of one. To avoid this tediousness, you can search for an issue with an attachment based on your custom criteria across all Jira projects.

Here is how:

  1. Open your project.
  2. Select Find attachments on the side bar.
  3. Run the search.

You can search for an issue using an attachment’s author or uploader. Also, you can search with the attachment’s name or a few characters from its name. Once you type this in the search bar, click Search. From the results, you will see a link to the issue you searched for under Issue Key.

Search for Jira attachments in a tab to find attachments

What’s next?

If you are considering trying Jira Software on Cloud, it’s high time to start and master the platform capabilities. For those of you who have some expertise in Jira and want to organize document management processes, Smart Attachments for Jira can be beneficial. This app helps you to label documents for further filtration and grouping, track document revisions, search for attachments, view all attachments within projects, or delete bulk attachments.

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    Structure and Secure Jira Attachments

    November 29, 2022
    #Jira#Document management
    7 min

    Jira offers a variety of functions for project management and workflow automation. For this reason, companies love using it in various industries. With all benefits Jira brings to us, working with Jira attachments turns out to be troublesome.

    You expect to get a well-organized system of Jira attachments that are easy to find and organize. Instead, you can end up browsing through your Jira issues looking for an attachment you need or repeating the routine actions with your files.

    In this article, we’ll cover how to manage attachments efficiently and keep sensitive documents safe in Jira Data Center with the help of Smart Attachments for Jira.

    Let’s look at the use case of a bank that keeps its daily work in Jira. The bank uses Jira to track daily employee activities, cooperate with customers, and develop new projects and initiatives. Their Jira issues undergo various multi-step workflows. At each step of any workflow, users add files and documents. So, you can imagine that the attachment section soon becomes a pile of files. Additionally, the documents can have several revisions and different levels of security.

    Key points in Jira attachment management

    Effective attachment structure and search

    Browsing through the list of attachments can be time-consuming. Bank employees actively use Jira as a single resource for their projects. They avoid switching between different services and keep their attachments directly in Jira. In this case , looking for a specific attachment in the long list under each issue becomes tedious.

    Revision control

    Each stage of the bank workflow underlines the high feasibility of document edits. Multiple users work on the same document, and they need to be sure that they locate the latest document revision. This becomes difficult with several files with the same name and requires additional effort and attention.

    Locking the documents against changes

    After the multi-step validation process, bank files must stay protected against changes so that users don’t change anything by mistake. At the same time, edits of some documents should remain possible for a certain group of Jira users.

    Validation of attachments 

    Many bank activities require specific files to be present before the issue is created or transitioned. If the files are missing, the project process fails or delays.

    Restricted visibility for sensitive documents.

    Some attachments in Jira issues contain customer data or other sensitive information. They are visible for certain bank employees but must remain unavailable for others.

    Use case solution

    Minding the attachment management requirements stated above, the bank team implemented their Jira documentation workflow with the Smart Attachments for Jira app. This app has rich functionality and an intuitive interface for inexperienced users.

    This app streamlines document management by enabling the creation of custom categories for organizing documents within issues. You can structure attachments according to your needs into separate categories. It also simplifies the editing process by allowing users to comment on files and create separate document revisions. Available workflow automation allows using Jira conditions, validators, and post-functions to validate file uploads and automate routine functions.

    Using the Smart Attachments app, the bank creates a multi-step project workflow. A series of document categories correlate with the processes of the bank departments and allow users to keep their attachments structured. Now their Jira files are divided into document types. Users can bulk upload, update, and delete their attachments. They locate the required documents faster.

    bulk operations with jira attachments

    Not all projects and issue types require the same categories. With Smart Attachments, the bank defines specific categories based on the issue type and workflow stage. So, the attachment section looks concise, having only the requirements for a particular issue type and development stage categories.

    Jira attachments category

    The app also allows Jira administrators to apply access restrictions for specific users, groups, and roles. The team can keep private documents secure and visible only to certain employees.

    access restriction to jira files

    To automate routine operations, the bank can add workflow automation using validators and post-functions. For example, if required, whenever an issue is created, the app validates the presence of required files. Otherwise, the issue cannot be created. At other steps, the app validates the availability of bank files with specific file names. Post-functions allow bank employees to send attachments to their clients without leaving Jira.

    jira post-functions and validators for attachments

    As a result of using the Smart Attachments for Jira app, the bank has created the attachment management system in Jira.

    With this app, you can keep your attachments safe and organized. You can now try the same for your Jira instance by starting with Smart Attachments on the Atlassian Marketplace. The first month is free for you to evaluate the app.

    Read more about how to run document management in Jira like a pro.

    Smart Attachments 2.4.0: Project Storage for Your Documents

    September 19, 2019
    #News#Jira
    2 min

    We are happy to announce release for our document management solution – Smart Attachments 2.4.0 for Jira.

    This version introduces the file storage for convenient collection of project documents within the project itself. Now if some files do not directly relate to any of the issues, you can upload them to the project storage where everyone can instantly access them.

    You can adjust the structure of the project storage for convenient retention of project requirements, policies, guides, and other documents.

    Navigate among folders of the project and locate the document you are looking for in a second. Perform all the essential operations on documents and folders with ease.

    If you plan to migrate from some existing Cloud storage, you just need to drop folders with documents into the project storage and the app will re-create the entire structure from scratch. You will not need to manually add folders one by one, let the app do this work instead of you. Spend this time on anything else (smile)

    We would greatly appreciate to receive any feedback and requests on this functionality.

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