Since more than half of our Jira customers also use Confluence, the Team Calendars development team has been working hard to tighten the integration between the two. We know that not everyone lives inside of Jira and you’ve told us that your team members that work in Confluence want to keep track of the projects that are tracked in Jira. Our latest release, Team Calendars 1.6, takes integration to a new level by making it possible to map your Jira projects’ version and issue due dates, and other custom date fields on calendars inside Confluence for everyone to see.
What is Team Calendars?
Team Calendars is your single-source of truth for managing team leave, tracking Jira projects, and planning events. A compliment to your personal calendar solution, Team Calendars, tracks the schedule for your team and keeps everyone on the same page. You can create three different types of calendars with Team Calendars and mash them together into your own single custom view:
- Jira Calendars – track projects through version, issue, and other custom due dates. Jira events (issues and versions) are automatically linked to your Jira instance.
- People Calendars – schedule team leave, track team vacation or create team rosters. Link these events to Confluence pages for more information regarding leave and travel plans.
- Event Calendars – plan your next big campaign, communicate company-wide events, training or any other team event. Link these events to Confluence pages for more information.
Learn about all of the features, including calendar restrictions, calendar sharing, and importing and exporting calendar data that Team Calendars offers here.
Team Calendars: Connecting Jira and Confluence
Jira Calendars enable development managers and team leads to:
- Communicate project plans to their team or organization by visualizing issues, version, and custom due dates on a calendar
- Understand how the availability of their team could impact their project by cross-referencing your Jira Calendar with your People Calendar where you track team leave
You may be a triage-master, that has little problem visualizing your release schedule through a list of issues in Jira, but mapping that same schedule on a calendar may be extremely helpful for your team. Combine that same Jira Calendar with a People Calendar, and you might find that you’ve scheduled the QA Due Date for an issue during the same week your lead QA engineer is on leave.
Team Calendars provides your team with a holistic approach to mapping its projects. There are two use cases that make Team Calendars particularly useful:
Perfect for Teams using Jira for Issue Tracking
A project issue has its own life-cycle. Many teams have different milestones they wish to capture and communicate for each project issue – e.g. QA Due Date, Design Due Date, Deployment Date etc. With Team Calendars, any of the custom date fields for your Jira issues can be chosen to appear in your Jira Calendar in Confluence. Combine your project calendar with your team vacation or travel calendar to see how the availability of your team could impact your project schedule.
Improve Communication Between Cross-Functional Teams
You can even allow your Marketing Team to plan their marketing campaign in accordance with your release schedule. If it’s all on one calendar, Marketing can accurately follow the release and plan their campaign accordingly. If something is delayed or pushed back, Marketing will the change on the calendar and adjust their plans as needed. Thanks to Team Calendars, Marketing no longer has to closely follow updates in both Jira and Confluence.
IT Teams Using Jira for Change Management
“What the heck is Change Management?”, you might ask. At Atlassian it refers to scheduling, communicating, and executing changes to our internal systems. Change Management can be challenging and a time consuming process. If we need to upgrade our intranet to a new version we create a task in Jira to track the task. We define deployment dates for each of their environments inside a Jira issue using custom date fields – e.g. Development, Staging, and Production deployment dates. In many ways it’s like tracking a development project – scope is key. A list of issues derived from JQL is not necessarily the best way to visualize your team’s upcoming changes. Displaying your team’s scheduled changes on a calendar is.
When you combine your Jira Calendars with your People Calendars in a single consolidated view, you’ve got a great solution for communicating when changes are going to happen and identify if you’ve got any resourcing constraints that might impact your ability to make scheduled changes.
What are you waiting for?
Got Jira? Using Confluence? Give Team Calendars a try today!
Don’t have Confluence yet? You’ll need Confluence in order to try Team Calendars, so check out Confluence first.
With an average of 62 downloads a day and 2,207 teams – like Facebook, Skype, Workday, and HTC – using Team Calendars to schedule their leave, track projects, and plan events, Team Calendars is only getting stronger.
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