JIRA Service Desk 3.3.x release notes
These release notes are for JIRA Service Desk Server. If you're using JIRA Service Desk Cloud, you can read about the latest changes on the JIRA Service Desk Cloud blog.
Group customers in organizations
Have you ever thought "wouldn't it be great if I could group my customers, so I don't have to add them to requests one at a time, and I can deal with them in bulk?". You can now! Group your customers into organizations, and you can then add organizations directly to projects. Customers can be members of multiple organizations, and they can:
- raise requests in all projects the organization can access,
- view and search the organization's requests from the My Requests page in the portal,
- receive notifications about the organization's requests,
- share requests with the organization.
If you have the Service Desk Team role for a project, you can manage organizations from its Customers list ( 
).
Other updates for organizations
- In the customer portal, People involved is now called Shared with. In issues, organizations that customers share with display in the new Organizations custom field.
- In Project settings, Request security is now called Customer permissions.
- In the Customers list, Invite customers is now called Add customers.
- Agents don't display on the Customers list.
- In the customer portal, approval notifications display in the Requests menu.
There are two new JQL queries that you can use to create queues, SLAs and reports for organizations:
Query | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Organizations = "organization name" | Returns all issues shared with an organization | Organizations = "Charlie Cakes Melbourne" |
| single user field in organizationMembers("organization name") | Returns all issues where the user is a member of the organization | Reporter in organizationMembers("Charlie Cakes Melbourne") |
Customize your email notifications with style
You asked for it, we built it! We've added a new page to your project settings called Customer notifications. Here, you can edit the messages that are sent as your project's notifications, and really add your company's voice and tone to the notifications your customers will receive.
From this page you can:
- create your own custom rules in automation and send your customers very specific notifications,
- change the default subject line and content of your notifications,
- add custom styling and use markdown formatting, and
- manage languages and add translations if required.
This has been a very popular request, and we're delighted to put more power into the hands of our customers!
Portal updates
Agents can add announcements to a portal or help center
Administrators can now enable announcements for agents, so that agents can keep customers informed about things like outages and holiday hours, and add updates.
- To allow agents to add announcements to the help center, JIRA administrators can go to
> Applications > JIRA Service Desk Configuration. - To allow agents to add announcements to the portal, project administrators can go to Project settings > Portal settings. Both project administrators and agents can now add portal announcements from the Portal > Edit announcement, not Portal settings.
Customers can select their language
Customers can change their language preference in the portal by selecting Profile under their profile avatar, and then choosing to Edit their profile. This means the portal and future notifications will be sent to them in their chosen language. Wunderbar!
Rich text editing
We released rich text editing as an opt-in labs feature in JIRA Service Desk 7.2, and now we're pleased to announce that rich text editing has graduated to the default editing experience in JIRA Service Desk. This means when you upgrade or install JIRA Service Desk 7.3, the rich text editor will be turned on by default. This gives your users the option to either use Visual mode (what you see is what you get) or Text mode (wiki markdown). We've retained the ability for administrators to disable rich text editing if they wish, this will disable it for the entire instance, and all your users.
To disable the rich text editor, select > System, and select Rich text editor from the sidebar.
Project level administration
We've extended the project administrators permission, so that project administrators can now edit their project's workflow under certain conditions:
- The workflow must not be shared with any other projects
- The workflow cannot be the JIRA default system workflow, which cannot be edited at all
The project admins won't be able to edit the workflow to the same extent as a JIRA administrator. The restrictions are:
- To add a status, the status must already exist in the JIRA instance i.e. the project admin can't create new statuses or edit existing statuses.
- The project admin isn't allowed to delete a status from the workflow.
- The project admin can create, update or delete transitions, but they can't select or update a screen used by the transition, or edit a transition's properties, conditions, validators or post-functions.
This feature is enabled by default, and can't be disabled. When you upgrade to JIRA Service Desk 7.3, all your project administrators will have access to this feature immediately. To edit a workflow as a project administrator, select Project settings in your project's sidebar, and select an issue type. This will present the workflow, and Edit will be available.
We understand this is a big change, so we've created a script that will help JIRA admins work out what the impact to their instance will be. The scripts return a list of your projects, and which groups and/or users will be able to edit the project's workflows. We've also added a new 'workflow' event to the audit log that'll let you know who made workflow changes, and to which projects.
Starting a JIRA instance
We've added two features that relate to starting JIRA:
- We've added an extra step to the JIRA install/upgrade process that means you need to actively choose to start JIRA.
- We've added a feature that lets you start JIRA manually with all non-system add-ons disabled.
1. Installing and upgrading start up
Now when you install or upgrade a JIRA instance, you need to actively select to start JIRA. This change was required to allow us to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a Quick Start guide using CloudFormation templates to allow you to deploy JIRA Service Desk Data Center in an AWS environment.
2. Disable non-system add-ons
We've added a feature that allows you to start a JIRA instance with all user installed and custom add-ons disabled, or with a specified list of these add-ons disabled:
--disable-all-addons (or /disablealladdons for Windows users)
--disable-addons=<addon keys> or (/disableaddons=<addon keys> for Windows users)
This feature is designed to help with upgrades and installation issues where an add-on failing during JIRA startup stops your JIRA instance from starting. You'll be able to disable the add-on/s, start JIRA and manually remove the add-on through the add-on manager.
Data Center single sign-on
In October 2016, we launched an add-on that would allow our JIRA Service Desk Data Center offering to support SAML single sign-on. We've worked hard to bundle this with JIRA Service Desk so that it works straight out of the box. From JIRA Service Desk 3.3, you can now link your Data Center licensed instance to your existing supported Identity Provider (IdP), and provide your users with a single sign-on experience. This reduces the number of passwords a user needs to remember, and provides extra security for your instance.
Other improvements and updates
- We added a trigger to automate events when an issue comment is edited.
- We added a new metric for reporting on success of your SLAs. Go to Project settings> Reports and try making a report with the new % met series.
- You can now create and link to a Confluence knowledge base directly from your project sidebar.
- We expanded the set of fields you can add using automation rules. You can now edit components or labels in the Edit issue THEN action.