JIRA and Salesforce CRM

JIRA Project Management Tool

Using JIRA, organizations can track bugs, issues, and the progress of various tasks for software and mobile applications under development. Tracking these tasks related to bugs and issues is made extremely simple with JIRA’s powerful dashboard, which is full of features. A product like JIRA core contains programs such as JIRA software, service desk, and other things that simplify tasks like generic project management and agile project management.

Some key features of JIRA:

Updates are provided in real-time: JIRA delivers data updates on a real-time basis via email.

• Bug-tracking: JIRA offers an integrated bug-tracking system. A bug can be limited to a certain number of people or teams, based on security restrictions. By default, projects and tasks are assigned to it based on its Permission Scheme.
• Integrate with a variety of tools: With JIRA, Users can integrate Salesforce, GitHub, Tempo, EasyBI, etc. As well as all the other tools they may use to solve issues. This allows IT and software teams to work together and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

The Agile Development Process: Scrum and Kanban boards can be seen as a smooth and easy way to work with JIRA. As a fundamentally Agile system, JIRA asks users to choose a project type upon creation of a project as Scrum or Kanban. To create boards, it even supports the Scrumban (Hybrid of Kanban and Scrum) methodology.

Introduction to Salesforce.

Salesforce is a CRM software tool that can help maintain and manage the interactions between your organization, customers, and prospects. This data is generated by Salesforce via its interactions with customers. As well as offering data analytics and IoT products, it offers cloud-based tools. These sources generate valuable information about customers and are useful to businesses.

Some Key features of Salesforce:

• Customer Relationship Management: Through Salesforce, you can access comprehensive customer data and history of interactions to enhance contact management. Using customer data to understand customer behavior using a variety of trends and metrics to develop strategies is a great way to gain insight into their behavior.
• Enhanced dashboard functionality: Using key factors like market trends, customer behavior, etc., Salesforce’s interactive dashboards provide a comprehensive snapshot of the company’s performance. The dashboard functionality makes it easy for your business to generate real-time reports.
• Managing opportunities: This Salesforce’s CRM feature is undoubtedly one of its best aspects. This will give you a detailed view of all your customers, their history, their buying patterns, etc. to help you plan out your next move.
• Support for Email Integration: With Salesforce, you can synchronize your calendars and schedules with applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. Additionally, it allows you to create personalized templates for potential customers and allows offline access to important emails.

Use cases of Salesforce to Jira Integration

1. Create and manage Jira tickets:
   The Salesforce support team can escalate a salesforce case as a Jira ticket. It permits the support reps to create, link/unlink, update, clone, and track a Jira issue without leaving the salesforce.
2. Adding attachments and comments:
   The Support team can add attachments and comments to an existing Jira ticket without leaving the salesforce. These attachments and comments help the product team understand the customer issue and speedy resolution of customer issues.
3. Search for existing Jira tickets:
   The support team can search for an existing similar Jira ticket before creating a new Jira ticket. If the existing ticket is solved, it can be used as a knowledge base for the speedy resolution of the escalated case; otherwise, the escalated case can be linked to the existing ticket.
4. Prioritizing Jira issues:
    The support team can mark the case priority as High, Medium, and low while creating a Jira ticket. This will help the product team prioritize the issues effectively.
5. Respond to escalated issues:
   This integration permits the engineering team to respond to the escalated issues from the Jira without switching the instance.

Ways to Integrate Salesforce with Jira:

Following are the possible ways to Integrate Salesforce with Jira.

1. Connector
2. Custom Integration

Connecting JIRA to Salesforce with the Peeklogic connector

Peeklogic connector is a Salesforce AppExchange application that can be downloaded from the AppExchange. It allows users to integrate JIRA with Salesforce. The users can quickly synchronize their Salesforce data with JIRA using the Peeklogic connector. It allows users to handle JIRA issues, product releases, and customer interactions with ease. Service and Sales clouds are supported by this connector. It can Integrate multiple Salesforce instances with Jira. It offers a 60 days free trial period and along with this, it offers a $20 per month per user subscription with no minimum order OR any annual commitment.

Peeklogic connector is loaded with several features some of them are as:

• Supports flexible integration between Jira and Salesforce.
• Search for Jira Issues from Salesforce and link to Salesforce records.
• Add Comment and attachment to the Jira issue from Salesforce.
• It provides bi-directional sync of data between Salesforce and Jira.
• It is easily configurable/ customizable.
• It provides search functionality that allows users to search data from external systems.
• It provides real-time sync, which updates the external system immediately after the record is created/updated.

Steps to Install and Configure the Peeklogic Jira Connector:

Step 1.  Installation of the Peeklogic connector package in Salesforce

1.Search for the Peeklogic connector on the Salesforce AppExchange and Click on “Get it now” to begin.

2.The ‘Install in Sandbox’ or ‘Install in Production option will now appear in a dialogue box. Select a proper place to install.

3.The package installation landing page will appear, where you can select whether the package is installed for admins, all users, or specific individuals. Depending on your needs, select the desired option.

Step 2.  Configuration of  Peeklogic connector package in Salesforce – Refer to the following ling for Installation and Configuration of Peeklogic Jira Connector

Following are the few other Connectors available in the market as well:

• Sinergify
• Go2Group
• zAgile
• ServiceRocket
• Workato

Integrating JIRA and Salesforce Using JIRA REST APIs

Data can be easily fetched and synchronized with multiple applications using JIRA APIs. The Salesforce APIs for JIRA require that the Salesforce Apex Class be implemented, to enable Monitoring and Updating directly from Salesforce.

Following are the steps we need to implement this:

• Step 1: The first step is to enable external server calls in Salesforce
• Step 2: Storing Jira Credentials in Salesforce
• Step 3: Performing Operation In Jira using REST API’s
• Step 4: Setting up API classes in Salesforce

3.Performing Operation In Jira using REST APIs

Jira provides a bunch of APIs to perform various operations from an External system to JIRA. Following is the link to the JIRA API document.
https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/intro/

Let’s discuss a few APIs in brief.

1)Create Issue:
To create an issue in JIRA from Salesforce we have to make a POST REST request. Below is the URL Endpoint to create an issue in JIRA.
JIRA_URL/rest/api/2/issue

Following are the steps to create a Jira issue from salesforce on case record creation with Salesforce Process Builder:

1.Set up a process builder
Following are the steps to create a process builder:

2) Get Issue:

To fetch an existing issue in JIRA from Salesforce we have to make a GET REST request. JIRA RESTful APIs use the issue key or Id to fetch an existing issue. Below is the URL Endpoint to fetch an existing issue in JIRA.
JIRA_URL/rest/api/2/issue/{issueIdOrKey}

3) Add Comment to an existing issue:
To Add Comments to an existing issue in JIRA from Salesforce we have to make a POST REST request. Below is the URL Endpoint to create an issue in JIRA.
JIRA_URL/rest/api/2/issue/comment

Following are the limitations of Custom Integration:

• RESTful APIs must be understood by users before they can use them. It can be challenging for beginner users.
• Not all users can easily access issues and projects. Users have limited rights to the JIRA REST APIs, which require them to have administrator permissions.