Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian JIRA – First Quarter 2016
April 26, 2016
#Jira
3 min
This year we continue our regular series of posts featuring Top 5 add-ons for the most popular Atlassian products. And our new series starts from the 5-add-on pack for JIRA Server and JIRA Cloud. All these add-ons were released in the first quarter of 2016. You can also read our previous blog posts highlighting Top 5 add-ons in the first, second, third and fourth quarters of 2015.
Top 5 new add-ons for JIRA Server and Cloud includes only add-ons that appeared in the Atlassian Marketplace from January to March 2016. So, ladies and gentlemen, meet them:
Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian JIRA – Fourth Quarter 2015
February 9, 2016
#Jira
2 min
Last week we published the post about Top 5 new add-ons for Confluence. Today’s article features five of the best new plugins for Atlassian JIRA appeared on Atlassian Marketplace during the 4th quarter of 2015. In our blog, you can also find posts that highlighted top 5 add-ons for JIRA for the first, second and third quarters of 2015.
Top 5 new add-ons for JIRA that had their first release during October – December 2015:
Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – Fourth Quarter 2015
February 4, 2016
#Confluence
2 min
It’s time to overview new add-ons appeared on the Atlassian Marketplace in the 4th quarter of 2015. Today’s post will feature 5 new plugins for Confluence that we thought can be most useful for our readers. Articles with add-ons for JIRA and DevTools are coming soon.
Earlier we have published posts about best add-ons for Confluence of the first, second and third quarters of 2015 as a part of the ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’ series.
Top 5 new add-ons for Confluence that had their first release during October-December 2015:
Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian JIRA – Third Quarter 2015
November 26, 2015
#Jira
12 min
Today’s article is a part of the series of quarterly posts ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’ and covers some of the best add-ons appeared on Atlassian Marketplace during the 3rd quarter of 2015. If you are new to our blog, check out earlier posts that featured top 5 add-ons for JIRA for the first and second quarters of 2015.
Keep reading and you’ll get a general idea about these add-ons to see if some of them are the tools you have been waiting for.
1. Refined Todo for JIRA
With Refined Todo for JIRA you can create and manage personal to-do lists right in JIRA and connect them to JIRA issues. No integrations are required.
This add-on allows you to easily make your own lists of things that are to be done, so that you wouldn’t forget small, but important tasks and wouldn’t need to keep everything in mind.
After installing the add-on, users can see a new link, My Todos, in the JIRA header. My Todos page is unique for each user and includes their personal tasks not visible to the rest of the team.
Below is the view of the My Todos page:
On this page you can create new tasks on the fly by using the Todo creation field or by adding todos inline – as you click on the area between two todos, a Todo creation field appears in that place.
While adding a new to-do, you can tag it, set up a reminder and a deadline, mark whether it is something you are going to do in the near future or some time later.
All your tasks are arranged in two sections: Now and Later. So future tasks don’t mix up with the to-dos that you should focus on in the mean time.
Click a task to see its detailed view on the sidebar, where you can add description and connect to a JIRA issue.
There are notifications about tasks that have their deadline on that day and alarms based on a reminder you have set for a task. When a task is done, you just mark a checkbox and it becomes completed.
On a JIRA issue page, you can see all to-dos connected to it and add new to-dos as well.
Your To-do lists don’t get overloaded with completed tasks thanks to the Archiving old todos configuration.
Pricing: Refined Todo for JIRA is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 400$ for 25 users; 750$ for 50 users 1500$ for 100 users. Try it
2. JExcel
JExcel makes work in JIRA similar to working in Excel. This add-on can help you land your non-IT people into JIRA, as they will avoid JIRA complexity. It basically turns JIRA into Excel-like tool that is quite intuitive for users familiar with Excel. JIRA power users can also find this plugin helpful if they are looking for a tool for in-place issue editing and creation.
The idea is that you create a workbook on the JExcel page in JIRA by selecting JIRA projects or filters and have the corresponding issues displayed in a table that reminds an Excel table.
It is not only the UI that users will find similar to what they are used to in Excel, but major operations, such as issue creation and editing, column filtering and sorting are also performed in a familiar way.
Additional capabilities:
Copy&Paste from MS Excel/Notepad
Exporting or printing workbook content
Changing issue status
Calculating Average/Count/Sum of the selected cells
Column renaming, reordering and resizing
Working with thousands of issues without reload a page (paging, filtering, sorting)
Column freeze
Tab coloring
Pricing: JExcel is available for Server instances and is free. Try it
3. SQL for JIRA – JQL to SQL conversion
SQL for JIRA – JQL to SQL conversion wraps the JIRA Java API with standard SQL in read-only mode allowing JIRA users to execute SQL inquiries and build powerful JDBC/SQL standard reports. The plugin doesn’t require the direct access to the legacy database, as this plugin creates its own relational database engine in memory and all SQL queries are resolved against the JIRA Java API via JDBC over the HTTP protocol. The in-memory database is JIRA user’s context aware and data is being returned based on the permissions of a logged in JIRA user.
The SQL queries can be executed in several ways:
Using the built-in SQL web console, which allows to perform SQL from the JIRA web application
Via any industry-standard reporting tool supporting JDBC (BIRT, Pentaho, JasperReports, your own corporate applications or JIRA plugins, etc.) using a native JDBC Driver that is provided to access JIRA data remotely
By embedding SQL queries in JQL queries for issue filtration to overcome JQL limitations, use aggregation functions (SUM, COUNT, AVG, etc.) and access JIRA data unavailable from JQL
Kinto Soft also provides two free add-ons that extend the functionality of SQL for JIRA:
SQL for JIRA Reports & Gadgets – allows to create reports visually from Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool) and embed them in JIRA Dashboards with tables, charts, runtime parameters, scripting, events, etc.
SQL for JIRA Custom Fields – allows to embed SQL for JIRA query results in issue custom fields (text and tables) available on the Issue Detail View
Pricing: SQL for JIRA – JQL to SQL conversion is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 300$ for 25 users; 550$ for 50 users; 1000$ for 100 users. Try it
4. Image Annotator for JIRA
Sometimes it’s faster and easier to share your feedback by showing than by describing with words. In such cases Image Annotator for JIRA comes in handy as it allows to annotate graphics files attached to JIRA issues, such as screenshots, pictures and mock-ups right in JIRA.
To annotate an image attachment, a user is supposed to have the permission to delete that attachment based on project and issue permissions.
How it works:
navigate to an issue of your choice
in JIRA issue view, locate an image attachment you would like to annotate, hover it and click the Edit icon
in Annotator popup, draw something (lines, arrows, rectangles and freehand) or add text using available tools, actions and options
save annotations to the original file or a new one and it’s done
JPEG and PNG file formats are supported (BMP files can be annotated in Mozilla Firefox).
Pricing: Image Annotator for JIRA is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 60$ for 25 users; 110$ for 50 users; 200$ for 100 users. Try it
5. Teams for JIRA Service Desk
With Teams for JIRA Service Desk you can create teams and associate users and groups with them so that customers could participate in service requests of their team mates.
After installation, you should do the initial set up:
select a technical user that will be used in API requests
create teams and associate users and groups with them
add Team custom field to the Create and View screens for your Service Desk agent and to the customer request form in JIRA Service Desk
enable ‘Customers can add participants to their requests’ in your Service Desk project settings
Once done, users that belong to a certain team can browse service requests created by other members of their team on the portal and join requests by clicking the corresponding button.
If a user is associated with several teams, when creating a request they can choose which team it should be shared with.
There is also an option to allow customers to create private requests that will not be available to the team.
Pricing: Teams for JIRA Service Desk is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 300$ for 25 users; 550$ for 50 users 1000$ for 100 users. Try it
If you get any questions, feel free to ask them in comments below or email me at kkolina@stiltsoft.com.
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Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – Third Quarter 2015
October 27, 2015
#Confluence
12 min
Are you following up on our series of quarterly posts ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’ yet? We launched it this year and you can check out the articles about add-ons for Confluence of the first and second quarters. Today’s post will highlight 5 add-ons for Confluence picked from all that were added on the Marketplace within July-September 2015. We meant this selection to be relevant for our various audience. The articles with top 5 plugins for JIRA and Bitbucket Server (Stash) are also coming soon.
Top 5 new add-ons for Confluence that had their first release during July-September 2015:
Confluence administrator creates filter groups and adds certain filters in each group. When creating a filter, it is necessary to specify its name (something that would be clear for your users) and a label that will be associated with this filter.
Let’s see what these add-ons are designed for, how you can benefit from using them and how much their licenses are.
Once you have filter groups and filters associated with certain labels, it is necessary to make sure that your Confluence content (pages, blog posts, attachments) is labeled using filter labels to make it discoverable for the add-on. When editing labels in the ‘Labels’ dialogue, you can see filters arranged in groups. By selecting needed filters, a user adds corresponding filter labels to a page.
When everything is set up, it is time to actually use the search functionality. There are several options. You can add:
When a user performs their search using the plugin search field, link or site-wide search box, they see the page with search results built based on the predefined parameters, specified in the macros settings or in the code added while setting up targeted search box. On the search results page, there are groups of filters to the left that can be used to refine search results by point-and-click.
The add-on also provides the Upload Attachment Button macro that allows you to add a button on a page, using which a user can upload files and have them attached to the current page with given labels being automatically applied to uploaded attachments.
Pricing: Brikit Targeted Search for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 360$ for 25 users; 660$ for 50 users; 1200$ for 100 users.
Metadata for Confluence allows Confluence and Space administrators to assign metadata fields and sets of fields to specific pages, several pages, all pages in a space or across all spaces in order to have a congruent common structure in Confluence.
Metadata sets may be:
global – configured by Confluence administrator and available in all Confluence spaces
user-created – configured by Space admin and available in only this particular space
E.g., you want all pages in a space to have the ‘Content Info‘ metadata set with the following metadata fields: Contact Person, Page Status, Page Status Message:
To do that, you should:
Select ‘Metadata’ in the ‘Space tools’
Add the corresponding fields in the ‘Add Metadata Field’ tabHere you can add default value for a field and select type of your field:
Multi Select (Checkboxes)
Single Select (Dropdown)
Link
Single Select (Radio Buttons)
Text
Use
Create a set in the ‘Metadata Sets’ tab and fill it up with required fields
Here you can choose what Confluence templates to add this set to. As long as you want this set to be automatically applied to every newly created page in the current space, mark the ‘Default Set’ check box. Each field can be marked as hidden or required.
Every newly created page will have the ‘Content Info’ metadata set assigned to it and users will be able to view and edit metadata fields in the pop-out dialogue by clicking icon on the top right of a page.
Space administrators can make bulk changes to metadata instead of editing fields per page. It is very convenient when you need to:
add or remove metadata sets to/from multiple pages at once
make same changes in same fields on several pages
The add-on includes 3 macros:
Display Metadata Macro – shows metadata of the current page. You can select if all metadata is displayed or only the fields or sets you select
Pricing: Metadata for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 240$ for 25 users; 440$ for 50 users; 800$ for 100 users.
With Presenter for Confluence you can easily make a slideshow from any Confluence page directly in your browser. The plugin adds the ‘Present’ option in the page ‘Tools’ menu.
As you click it, the content of a Confluence page turns into a slideshow with its structure preserved. You don’t have to work on separate decks, the add-on does the whole thing for you.
To get started, Confluence administrators should set up presentation profiles with different presentation styling and behavior by choosing a base theme or styling presentation with custom CSS and selecting the style and speed of the animation used for transitions between slides.
Other options include:
Display controls in the bottom right corner
Display a presentation progress bar
Display the page number of the current slide
Center slides vertically
Loop the presentation
Enable slide navigation via mouse wheel
Once done, users can pick a suitable presentation profile when selecting ‘Present’ in the ‘Tools’ page menu.
Permission Assistant provides global admins with the capability to manage user and group space permissions in bulk, see indirect permissions. It saves a lot of time in cases when you need to grant or edit permissions for a specific user or group across multiple spaces, as you get to do that in one place and no longer need to navigate to each space.
Features:
Search for users and groups
See all spaces with permissions (direct an inherited)
Add and remove permissions in bulk
Filter categorized, archived and personal spaces
See if a user receives permissions through a direct or group permission
Pricing: Permission Assistant is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 60$ for 25 users; 110$ for 50 users; 200$ for 100 users.
Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Stash – Second Quarter 2015
July 21, 2015
#News
8 min
Following the posts about new add-ons for Confluence and JIRA of the second quarter of 2015, today’s article will highlight top 5 new add-ons for Atlassian Stash, which our team considered to be the best products for Stash from those appeared on the Marketplace in April-July 2015. By the way, you can also check out our April post about new add-ons for Stash of the first quarter.
You’ll learn about the problems the add-ons are meant to solve, potential benefits for you and pricing.
1. Editor for Stash
With Editor for Stash you can edit your files right in Stash and avoid going through the whole Git workflow.
It allows previewing markdown before committing, works in your browser and doesn’t require cloning or editor.
Code folding and syntax highlighting are supported. When done editing, you can choose whether to commit directly into the branch or to create a pull request.
Other benefits:
Completely server-side
Support for Github Flavored Markdown
Configurable: direct commit privileges can be turned on or off on a per repository basis.
Support for personal repositories.
Pricing: A commercial license for Editor for Stash costs 160$ for 50 users (80$ for 25 users; 300$ for 100 users).
Pull Request Notifier for Stash is for those who need other systems, such as Jenkins, to be notified on Stash pull requests related events, e.g. when a new pull request is opened this add-on can trigger a build in Jenkins with necessary parameters like from/to repository and from/to hash.
Pull Request Notifier can invoke one or several custom URLs when a pull request event is triggered. There can be different URLs for different repositories with filters. URLs are highly configurable with various variables and 2 fields to construct a filter (filter string and filter regexp). You create a string with variables and add a regexp. When the regexp matches the text, the notification is triggered. It can, optionally, add HTTP Basic Authentication headers when triggering URL.
It includes support for wildcards, regular expressions, fuzziness, and more.
You can filter search results to:
only code, commits or file names
specific projects
certain slugs
certain refs
certain file extensions
a specific author
a certain date range
It’s possible to search globally through the Codesearch toolbar, or search in a specific project or repository by using the Stash toolbar on the left sidebar.
The add-on doesn’t require external servers or services, provides analytic search with search statistics.
Pricing: A commercial license for Search for Stash costs 400$ for 50 users (150$ for 25 users; 800$ for 100 users).
ScriptRunner for Stash helps ensure a good quality of merges, encourage following best development practices. It allows global administrators to apply hooks, merge checks, and event handlers for workflow automation and customization.
Most of them can be used with conditions for you to have more flexibility and control. Conditions can be added to all or selected repositories.
With this add-on you can set default and mandatory approvers for pull requests, prevent undesired events by providing abilities to:
stop developers pushing changes on behalf of someone else
stop change sets being pushed directly to your release or master branches
stop deletion of your release tags by mistake
ensure feature changes are associated with a JIRA issue through both scripted conditions and extended JQL queries
block pushes to your release branches after it has been frozen
It also includes administrative scripts that allow to:
mirror all commits and tags from GitHub and BitBucket to Stash (for you not to be dependent on GitHub and BitBucket being available at all times, or to migrate repositories from GitHub or BitBucket to Stash)
switch to a different user (e.g. to reproduce a problem a user is telling you about, merge a pull request on behalf of another user)
Pricing: A commercial license for ScriptRunner for Stash costs 330$ for 50 users (180$ for 25 users; 600$ for 100 users).
All Pull Requests allows displaying all pull requests for all available projects or only for a specific project. It can be useful when you need to see pull requests on a project or cross-project level.
It includes the Mergeability column that displays as an icon the information about what is blocking the merge operation:
