If you’re familiar with working in Jira, you’re also familiar with the following scenario: an issue escalates and its priority or status changes. But not every stakeholder of the issue is notified in time, you’re missing the context, things hiccup for a bit and your SLAs suffer. There must be a better way to react faster to important events in Jira, right? Enter our SMS app for Jira! In this blog post, we’ll break down the features of our SMS app for Jira and how to set it up.

What is it?

The name already kind of gives it away: our SMS app for Jira integrates with Jira instances and sends text messages via SMS to users based on triggers defined in an automation app (e.g. Automation for Jira), or ad hoc. This allows for faster responses through automatic notifications whenever a ticket or issue in Jira demands immediate attention.

What does it do?

The SMS app is tightly integrated with Jira, which has a couple of major benefits. First of all, it allows users to send a text message directly from a ticket or issue in Jira. The context of the ticket or issue and its variables are sent in the text message, with detailed logging integrated in the history of the Jira issue. The issue’s activity log also displays who sent a text message to which user(s), its contents, whether the message arrived and so on.

Secondly, administrators can use Jira’s native user management to manage the use of the SMS app. Easily change a user’s right to send text messages, group users and manage lists. Speaking of lists, the SMS app has its own distribution list management tool. This allows you to define lists of contacts and users per project, which can be used for text messaging later on.

The text message itself can be a predefined message, for example a default message on a project level basis or depending on the type of issue. It’s also possible to send ‘ad hoc’ messages containing free text or send a message to extra Jira users or external phone numbers.

How do I set it up?

Setting up the SMS app only takes about 10 minutes and only requires two things:

• an agreement with an SMS gateway or provider,
• and filling in the details of that provider in the SMS app. That’s it!

Interested in how it works in practice? Here’s a case study (Dutch) so you can see how we implemented the SMS app for a client with over 500 users. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us here!