This blog post is a guest post written by Andra Dinu from Adaptavist, the largest Atlassian services provider worldwide and present at our Team Up! event in October last year.

The customer: Odisee

Odisee is a Bruxelles University College that offers courses in business, healthcare and technology to over 10,000 students across 79 nationalities.

The problem: Jira’s language limitation

Odisee’s support team provides IT help to all staff members, professors and students. The challenge comes from the fact that the user experience needs to be in both Dutch and English, because of the language diversity present on campus. Odisee has a basic setup with a standard application link between Jira Service Management and Confluence acting as the knowledge base, but Jira is pretty limited when it comes to translation. ACA-IT Solutions stepped in to provide a customised solution.  

The solution: a seamless language experience

The Atlassian team at ACA IT-Solutions explains: “To begin with, the base translations that come with Jira/Confluence were tremendously helpful for translating all the default terms. We then used the Bitvoodoo language plug-in for Confluence to make the knowledge base content available in multiple languages. That’s when we stumbled on the biggest problem: how do we adjust the language for JIRA and Confluence in one go? We wanted the service management end-users to have a seamless experience, without them having to keep adjusting their language settings on each page of their JIRA/Confluence profile.”

Many websites that have language versions use flags to indicate the different languages, and the ACA team chose this solution for Odisee as well – with English and Dutch flags on all pages of the service management. But the challenge was to make the language change in both Jira and Confluence at the same time when a language was selected. ACA’s solutions lets a user click the flag corresponding to their language of choice and change the system language across their entire Jira and Confluence profiles. 

The ACA team elaborates: “To achieve this solution, we used two tools from the Adaptavist ScriptRunner family: ScriptRunner for Jira and ScriptRunner for Confluence. We’re big fans of ScriptRunner because it offers you virtually unlimited possibilities of modifying the Atlassian stack to do exactly what you want it to do.”

Here’s how they employed these tools for Odisee:

• Using the ‘Script Fragments’ feature of ScriptRunner, we added Javascript script fragments on the Odisee portal as menu items – the English and Dutch flag buttons.
• ScriptRunner comes with a feature called ‘REST Endpoints’ that supplement the REST endpoints that come as standard with Jira and Confluence. We used this feature in ScriptRunner for Confluence and ScriptRunner for Jira to create 2 REST endpoints that adjust the user language in Jira and Confluence.
• When a user switches the button to ‘English’ on the portal, the Jira REST endpoint is called to switch the language to English. The script also highlights the correct flag based on the active language.

ACA’s team facilitated switching languages by using an HTML module of the Refined theme for injecting the flag buttons with a script.

The Jira REST endpoint first gets the logged-in user from the Jira API, then the desired language from the Javascript REST endpoint. If both are filled out, it gets the locale of the logged-in user and checks whether they are the same. If they are not, it changes the locale in Jira and does a REST call to Confluence to change it there as well. The Confluence REST endpoint script works in the same way.

Here’s what the experience looks like for the end user:

ScriptRunner

ACA IT-Solutions was able to unlock the full power of Atlassian for their customer Odisee. Are you also looking to give your end-users an appropriate language experience, do you want to create powerful collaborations between Jira and Confluence, or do you have some time-saving, UX improving customisations in mind for Jira or Confluence?

Get started with a 30-day free trial of ScriptRunner for Confluence or start automating Jira with a 30-day free trial of ScriptRunner for Jira!