As a Jira Administrator, I always keep an eye on the Atlassian Cloud Roadmap to know about upcoming features. In the past, Atlassian released some great features for Jira / Jira Service Management Cloud. Some were urgently needed to keep up with Jira Datacenter like project based priorities.
Another already released Feature I really like is the organization filtering of customers by email domains, which allows you to automatically assign an organization to a customer, when the customer creates an account. This as a huge step forward in customer organization in Jira Service Management.
Taking a look at the upcoming features for 2025 and beyond, I picked three of them to talk and discuss. Note that I simply selected a few according to personal preference. Those can be related to Jira Service Management, Atlassian Guard, Jira Software or Jira Work Management.
Smart Values for Form Fields
This one allows us to receive the data of Form Fields via SmartValues in automation rules. And even if the Roadmap states Q1 2025 as release Date, this feature has already been rolled out in November 2024 as you can see in the corresponding issue and in a community blog post.
Forms in JSM are a great way to ask your customers for information in a structured way. It’s even possible to configure some conditional logic to forms. So a lot of people were asking on how to use forms in their request types to improve user experience or use them to ask questions to an issue after a customer already created the issue. The only downside was the lack of automation functionality. You had to map all form fields to custom fields to get the data or use some APIs. By using the new smart values for forms, there is no workaround needed anymore. No unnecessary customfileds cluttering up your Jira instance anymore.
SCIM provisioning for customer accounts
Talking about customer users in JSM, a customer can be an Atlassian Account or a portal only user. The portal only user is just a local account for a certain JSM instance. Being able to also manage portal-only customers from an external directory is a good improvement, since some organizations manage their customers in external directories anyway.
But there is one major thing missing, making me feel comfortable with portal-only customer accounts. When a user has a portal-only user, and decides to create an Atlassian Account with the same E-Mail, he cannot access the portal with that Atlassian Account. For the customer, it looks like all permissions to different JSM projects is lost. But it’s only the wrong user. As an administrator, you are able to migrate the portal-only user to the Atlassian user. I found a feature request asking for an API, so this task can be automated. But I think this should be a completely automated process. At least there should be an option to automatically migrate portal-only users who create an Atlassian Account. Just image what you as an administrator would need to do, if a 1000 portal-only users decide to create Atlassian Accounts 🙂
Conditional Logic in Jira forms for Work Management Projects
Forms are also available in Jira Work Management projects, but the functional scope is a lot smaller. Good to see, that Atlassian is further improving forms in JWM, as some teams just love the simplicity of a JWM project in general. Maybe I’ll write another post about my thoughts of Jira Work Management projects in the future.
Regarding the Jira Work Management Forms, what’s the number one feature Atlassian should implement is a possibility to use forms anonymously without the need of an Atlassian Account with a Jira license. Almost every time I present this feature to a customer, the first question is “do people need a license to see and send this form?”.
Conclusion
There are many great features coming up this year in the Atlassian Cloud universe. But still, there are so many good feature requests out there and even crucial Bugs Atlassian should take care of in my opinion. Some decisions are not really transparent for me, but lets thee what future brings to us. Maybe I’m going to write articles about some cases I really care about 🙂
