Microsoft Teams: Internal communication

This article details our recommendation on how to include our app in your internal project workflow & communication.

TLDR;

Our recommendation is to move as much discussion as possible to Microsoft Teams, as it’s much more suited for the task. Use Jira comments only for status updates and to capture issue relevant decisions.

Jira Comments	Teams Channel Conversation	Teams Chat
Status updates Decisions	Discussions with open audience, not limited to certain participants Currently the most feature rich way to discuss in Teams	Private / confidential discussions (like support chats) On-going communication for a longer period of time Discussions with participants that are not part of the usual channel(s)

When to choose Jira comments vs. a Microsoft Teams discussion

When we started using the app in our team, it became clear that we needed at least some form of guidance of when to use what. Up until we had our own app, we always had discussions about Jira issues in the comments section of Jira. This has a few downsides though:

Jira comments are not suited for longer or multiple discussions with different teams at once
Jira comments tend to send email notifications by default (+ push notifications if you are using the mobile app). This creates so much more places of notifications you’ll need to manage.
You can’t involve people / stakeholders in a discussion that don’t have a Jira user or access to the project

Having these problems in mind, we started to think about: “What do we want to use Jira comments for?” and came to the following outcome:

Using Jira comments for status updates to the issue
Using Jira comments to log decisions that are the result of a longer discussion

For everything else, we now use Microsoft Teams to discuss the issue. This makes Microsoft Teams the front and center of our internal communication and gets rid of unnecessary notifications via email / push.

Microsoft Teams channel vs. group chat

Our app offers two different ways of integrating a Microsoft Teams discussion into Jira.

Discuss a Jira issue in one or more Microsoft Teams channel threads
Discuss a Jira issue privately in a group chat

In general, in our IT and business teams, we prefer to use channel communication as much as possible, as it is more transparent and everyone can participate. We would only recommend to use group chat in the following scenarios:

You need a private/confidential place to discuss the issue (like issues with customer information or support requests)
You need to include participants that are not part of your usual Microsoft Teams channels