The Atlassian ecosystem is all about leveraging smart tools to get work done efficiently. That’s why our team of consultants were fired up about integrating our Jira instance with a new iOS app Shortcuts. What is better than having the most powerful tool for teamwork available on your mobile phone when you are on the go?
Shortcuts lets you create custom workflows which can be triggered manually or indeed via Siri. The app is useful for automating activities in your daily life; you could turn the lights on when you get home, play your favorite music
and send a text message – all with one action.
Or let’s say you are an Atlassian consultant at Valiantys – you could get all the events on your calendar for the day read out loud and your next appointment’s destination mapped. It’s a nifty feature if you’re traveling from client to client!
How the Shortcuts app and Jira instance work together
Shortcut works with actions, which are the single step in a task. With over 300 actions available, you can drag and drop different actions to create more sophisticated shortcuts.
Some of the actions can be impressively powerful. For example ‘Get Contents of URL’ lets you make full JSON requests:
At Valiantys, we’ve worked on an implementation to help our consultants get the details of their next mission while on the go:
They can get directions and choose their mode of transportation, depending on where they’re located:
They can retrieve the customer’s number and place a call:
Or add all the details to their calendar:
Another implementation we’ve worked on, while awaiting the release by Atlassian of a full iOS client, is to integrate with Jira issues and transition them directly from a mobile device:
A simple JSON request to our internal Jira instance can be triggered from anywhere, and agents can thus add comments and move issues while away from the office.
We’ve even automated our expenses workflow. Our staff can now capture their expenses as they occur, selecting the date, type of expense and amount:
The consultants can even take a picture of their receipts, and the Shortcuts app will add it to a dedicated customer folder, calculate the new running total and
keep all the details in a spreadsheet.
Once a month, these expenses are sent to our accounts department, and the Shortcuts app will prepare an email, attach the spreadsheet,
zip the receipts and send it to the accounting team – with a comment attached in Jira.
There are thousands of integrations possible with Shortcuts, and you can think of just about anything. Posting a new page to Confluence, editing a Trello board,
adding comments to Jira issues, or even automating your own internal tasks can now be done from your smartphone in just a few clicks!
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