Force of a Godzilla – Salesforce and JIRA

The name “JIRA” is inherited from the Japanese word “Gojira” which means “Godzilla.” When you combine it with Salesforce, you get “The Force of a Godzilla”!

Ideal CRM and Helpdesk Setup

We all are aware that Salesforce is world’s #1 CRM used across industries for managing customer data and is widely used by various departments like marketing, sales, project management, accounting, operations, support, and services. It instantly streamlines and automates your business processes bringing in incredible simplicity, efficiency, visibility and integration and proves to be a support to achieve higher customer satisfaction without any infrastructure to buy, setup or manage. That is the beauty of this cloud-based CRM application.

As mentioned above, Salesforce can manage the entire sales cycle, right from account creation by injecting leads into the system, creating relevant opportunities, to timely reminders for follow up and eventually closing the deal. With the ability to stage each of these milestones as a prospect, proposal, invoicing, won or lost, it can be easily customized as per your sales process requirements. In order to yield maximum benefits and become more efficient in handling data, Salesforce has integration capabilities with other systems like database, ERP, accounting, warehouse management, chat, LMS, helpdesk and more, which proves to be ideal for any organization in automating the IT ecosystem saving vast number of resource hours and investment.

Similarly, a well-known system called JIRA, mainly used by organizations for issue tracking, bug tracking, and agile project management, apart from its main functionalities, offers integration options with other major systems used by organizations to share and manage data efficiently.

In a typical customer service environment, it is vital to have a ticketing system in place, to log, track and resolve client issues. It enables organizations to understand their clients better, know the problem areas, and take the product or services in the right direction. JIRA Service Desk proves to be the ultimate resolution where incoming client requests are accepted and converted into a case, which is then assigned to a resource to work on.

The biggest reason why companies opt for JIRA with Salesforce is that they can work well hand in hand, where Salesforce is used for client management and JIRA for case management and project tracking. This proves to be a powerful combination for any organization which requires a straight and sorted issue tracking process to work, in association with a CRM that holds all client records. We can say that the Japanese correctly named JIRA after the name “GOJIRA’ which means Godzilla which when combined with Salesforce, becomes “The force of a Godzilla.”

Now that’s a POWERHOUSE! 

Well, after reading this, a fundamental question might have popped in our minds –

How do we know that our organization needs integration between Salesforce and JIRA? What are the factors to consider even to conclude that we should have an integration in place?

Here are some indicators:

1. You have a resource dedicated to ticket creation, resource alignment, prioritization, and SLA follow up and you are dependent on him to initiate the process
2. You have people entering the same data manually in Salesforce and JIRA
3. Your resources are spending more time entering data than doing the actual job
4. You have duplicate records or bad data
5. Your SLAs are not met for issue resolution
6. Low resource efficiency
7. You witness data mismatch in project, issues or bug tracking which is creating confusion between teams/resources
8. You are losing clients due to delayed, incorrect or unresolved issues logged
9. Inaccurate data analysis and forecast due to incorrect or varying data  

JIRA is well integrated with Atlassian suites like Confluence etc., which makes self-service and other knowledge article databases seamless.

Now that we know we need integration in place between the two systems, what should we look for in integration to best serve our organization?

1. Connector with prebuilt templates
2. Correct and seamless field mapping
3. Fully compatible with your Salesforce and JIRA versions
4. Auto-sync functionality with as low as 3 minutes or even real-time
5. Ability to make the integration bi-directional
6. Provides error logs and notifications
7. Ability to connect cloud to cloud or cloud to on-premise applications
8. A simple interface and ability to add new connectors in no time
9. Cost effective, i.e. higher ROI

Accurate field mapping is one of the most critical functionalities an integration tool should offer you. Let’s look at standard field mappings provided by DBSync which are ideal and are preferred by most of the organizations using Salesforce and JIRA.

Salesforces and JIRA Service Desk – JIRA Service Desk Issues to Salesforce Cases

JIRA Service Desk & Salesforce unidirectional standard template helps you integrate data between JIRA Service Desk and Salesforce. It enables you to streamline your data, automate business processes and ensure data accuracy between JIRA Service Desk and Salesforce to eliminate redundancy of data entry. 

With DBSync integration, you can construct custom mappings for this template. DBSync fully supports the creation of custom mappings as per your business model and business process.

This template supports almost all major versions of Salesforce: Salesforce Unlimited Edition, Salesforce Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition, and the Non-Profit Edition.

It supports JIRA Service Desk, JIRA Core and Service Desk Cloud or On-premise versions 

Salesforce and JIRA Core – Jira Core Issues to Salesforce Cases

The template is easy to integrate JIRA Core projects and Salesforce Cases. It provides Bidirectional integration capabilities with pre-built field to field mappings along with flexibility for more complex and dynamic mapping options.

This template supports JIRA Software 7.3.1 and above

Conclusion

Integrating the two systems, Salesforce and JIRA offers complete transparency in communication and supports cross – teamwork, making it more effective and productive. With the help of DBSync integration platform, it becomes easier for organizations to manage and track issues on both the systems with high levels of accuracy leading to higher customer satisfaction and organizational improvement.

DBSync standard solution and dynamic platform can help you integrate Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk almost in real time. In case of any specific needs, it can offer you a tailor-made solution just by leveraging the DBSync iPaaS and JIRA set of connectors. Please reach out to sales@mydbsync.com or call 1-877-739-2818 to get more information. Alternatively, reach out to your Account Manager if you already are a DBSync user. 

Speed up connectors’ turnaround with swagger specification

What is Swagger

Swagger is the world’s most popular and largest framework of API’s developer tools for the open API specification, enabling development across the entire API lifecycle, from design and documentation to test and deployment.

How Swagger Specifications Have Revolutionized API Ecosystem

In the developer community, with the growing popularity of RESTFUL web services over SOAP there’s a need to have one common standard for designing, developing and documenting APIs. The Swagger specifications come very handy in connecting engineers through their API’s to communicate with each other in a semantic fashion irrespective of the language used to design an API.

Swagger is an framework for describing a common language that everyone can understand. The OpenAPI (Swagger) Specification is a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs that allows humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without having to access the source code, documentation or through network traffic inspection.

Even though there are few other frameworks like RAML, API Blueprint which have gained some popularity, Swagger is still most popular framework in documenting APIs due to the following factors.

• Open source. Swagger being the first Open Source API framework is great and it’s simple to get started with the OpenAPI Specification. It’s clean, efficient, armed with number of powerful features and helps you to design and document your RESTful interfaces straight out of the box.
• Smart feedback. You can validate your Syntax for Swagger Compliance as you write it with concise error feedback and error handling capabilities. You can also render your API specification visually and interact with your API while you are still defining it.
  
  
• Fully customisable. Easy to configure and customize anything, from line-spacing to themes. You can also generate server stubs and client libraries for your API in any popular language.

The above benefits not only make developer’s life easier but also provide users with smoothly consumable APIs. Any API that adheres to the Swagger Specification are easy to read, iterate and readily consumed. Recently the Swagger Specifications has been moved to Linux Foundation under the name the Open API Initiative, as well as backed by IT giants like Microsoft, Google, Intuiti, Atlassian that focus on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format.

In the following section of the article I outline one such use-case in building custom connector, JIRA Service Desk.

Use Case

DBSync uses Swagger Specification through its API connector to build JIRA Service Desk connector that has considerably reduced the whole build cycle in releasing a new connector to the market.

The DBSync’s API connector can effectively integrate with any external system such as JIRA Service Desk by implementing the necessary Swagger Specifications and ApiCode interface. API connector is the fastest way to build any application connector which readily exposes its APIs to the public that may or may not adhere to Swagger or any other API specifications.

Integration is done by documenting all the JIRA Service Desk APIs in JSON object adhering to the Swagger Specifications.

Developing Jira Service Desk connector is as simple as creating a new Swagger JSON object that contains all the endpoints along with the parameters and return types that you would like to expose through the connector (this would fetch all the API metadata that will help in establishing the connection). This JSON object is internally consumed by API connector to expose JIRA Service Desk as an individual connector that can be used in Integration life cycle within the iPaaS.

Leveraging DBSync iPaaS for making API calls with JIRA Service Desk

DBSync’s JIRA Service Desk connector uses JIRA Service Desk APIs along with JIRA Core API’s to move data in and out of the application. This integration consists of REST calls using a JSON request/response made over an HTTPS connection. Therefore all of HTTP methods like, get, post, put and delete are supported as a part of the implementation.

Trigger section is used to fetch data from the source application within the platform. Using JIRA Service Desk connector we expose GET endpoints of the APIs that will equip the user to read data in a controlled way.

Rule section within platform is used to define the manner in a way the user want to write data to the target application which can be either a single data source or multiple data sources. In this section of the platform we expose, post, put API endpoints to pass the data to the desired API. The endpoint names alone are not enough to manage the entire integration life cycle in the iPaaS. Additionally the platform should also know the parameters that need to be passed to an API endpoint and return type parameters that are required for field mappings in transformation process.

Likewise, one can leverage the DBSync iPaaS for connecting with JIRA Service Desk and any other application to facilitate the data flow between them. By including API connector to its catalogue, DBSync has made process of building, publishing and deploying new connectors easier, within just a few days by following Swagger Specification. The platform has the ability to connect with legacy application or SaaS based application that have their API exposed.