Microsoft Teams: Start a chat in Jira

Feature overview

Start a Microsoft Teams conversation right in your Jira issue. Select a Microsoft Teams channel or start a chat. The issue will be linked with the conversation in Microsoft Teams.

Depending on how the feature appearance is configured and if you are using the new or old issue view, you can start this action a bit differently. We’ll assume you are using the default settings with the new Jira issue view.

Please see the end of the article to see how it looks like for other view settings.

How-to

Open an issue → Click on the “Microsoft Teams icon” in your issue → a dialogue opens.
Select “Chat” and choose “Participants” → Give a “chat title” → Type your message (with the full text editor incl. inline images) –> A link to the Jira issue is automatically added.
Shared chat access: You can also choose if the new chat should be visible to other Jira users (read-only) or if only chat members should be able to see the chat content. 💡 Read more about this here.

Please note: This will always create a new chat with a topic (either group or 1:1).

When finished → Click on “Send to Teams” → The whole conversation will appear in Jira and in Microsoft Teams
The best: Customers / team members not having access to Jira, can still join the conversation in MS Teams (because all information / conversation is accessible in both tools!)
You can view and add chat participants anytime by clicking on the ‘chat participants’ icon in the header on the top right (Jira Cloud only).

You can add multiple chats and conversations to your Jira issue. Open the drop down to view all related chats or conversations (Jira Cloud only).

Different view settings

Issue content (default)

Use the Microsoft Teams button at the top of your issue to start a new conversation or share the issue to a Microsoft Teams channel.

Activity appearance

Either use the top-right “…” menu to share the issue to Microsoft Teams or you click the activity tab at the bottom of your issue (next to “Comments”).

Shared chat access

When you create a new Teams chat from Jira, you have the option to choose the access for this chat.

How it works

When you share a chat with a Jira issue, you can give (read-only) access to other Jira users, that have access to this issue, e.g. other agents in a JSM project. Even though they are not a participant of the chat, they’ll still be able to view the chat content. This works by using our existing share-functionality, which allows you to give other Jira users very narrow access, to access the chat info on your behalf.

Permissions

Currently, there are only two options to choose from, though we are working on expanding this.

🔐 Private

This respects all Teams default permissions, e.g. only members of the chat can access chat contents.

👫 Shared

This gives read-only access to all Jira users or JSM agents that have access to this issue, and are logged in with Microsoft Teams.

🗣 Shared & allow joining

This gives read-only access to all Jira users or JSM agents that have access to this issue, and are logged in with Microsoft Teams. In addition, if a user wants to participate in the chat, they can simply join the chat on their own.

Chat notifications

When creating a new Teams chat from Jira in a JSM project, you can choose to post updates about the request into the chat.

These updates include customer facing status changes, comments, approvals and resolutions.
The updates will be posted by the customer portal app (acting as a bot) in the corresponding chat.
Chat notifications are available for chats with internal and external customers.

This feature is only available in JSM cloud projects and after completing the “Enable notifications” process of the Teams customer portal app. Please refer to Customer portal app | Enable-Teams-chat-notifications to learn about this process and constraints.

Chat with external & guest users

In Microsoft Teams, you can chat and collaborate with users of other organizations in two different ways.
You can read more about the differences here: Collaborate with people outside your organization.

External users

Creating a chat with external users (Business Accounts on Office 365) works the same way as with internal users. Just enter the email address of the external contact when creating a chat.

Please note, that we will not be able to check in advance, if a chat with the user will be able. There are a few requirements for this to work (see below).

Check if an external user is available trough Teams chat

There are a few requirements for an external chat to work:

The external contact needs to have a Microsoft Teams account for their email address
The organization of the external contact needs to allow chats with your organization
Your organization needs to allow chats with the external organization

To check if this is possible, you open a new chat in Microsoft Teams and enter the email address of the contact.

After clicking “Search […] externally” it will show you one of two messages:

	This error indicates that the user has no Teams account for this email address at all.
	This error indicates that your or the external users organization has restricted external chats. See below for help on this.

Allowing external chats

Please check the following help article by Microsoft on how to configure external access correctly. This will need the help of an Office administrator in both organizations: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-external-access

Guest users

Chatting with guest users is currently not supported, due to limitations on the Microsoft Teams side.

You can work around this limitation by creating the chat first and then adding the guest user afterwards in Microsoft Teams. It’s a known bug on Microsoft side and we hope to be able to support this soon.

Note: Even when you are using our workaround the Microsoft Graph API (the API used to create chats) is notoriously known for not handling guest / external users correctly sometimes.

Backup

You can make a backup of selected chats and channel discussions (a static HTML file will be added to the Jira issue, e. g. for audit purposes). Even if the chat or conversation has been deleted in Microsoft Teams, the static HTML file will still be documented in your Jira issue.

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/communicate-with-users-from-other-organizations

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-external-access

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/guest-access

Feature requirements

In order to start a MS Teams chat in Jira, the following set-up and configuration needs to done:

Step 1: Activate Teams feature in the admin settings JIRA ADMIN TO DO
Step 2: Install the Microsoft Teams app MS 365 ADMIN TO DO MICROSOFT TEAMS OWNER TO DO

Starting a simple chat from Jira does not require the installation of the Microsoft Teams app.

Jira & Microsoft deployment

Jira Cloud, Jira Server & Data Center (Server needs to be publicly available)
Microsoft 365 & MS Exchange