User Absence Planner for Jira

Created by Jonas Moehringer
Jun 27, 2021
4 min read

Todays post will be about our new app - User Absence Planner for Jira. It is on the Atlassian Marketplace for some weeks now and I would like to explain here what it does and what it can be used for.

Problem

Before being out of office for a while, on vacation, business trip or long term leave for example, everyone sets an out of office message in their mail client. When writing you an email people get an automated response that you are out of office in that period. This is a quite usual procedure in many companies. However, what about your Jira account? What about important issues you get assigned during your holidays? Do other users get notified in Jira as well that you aren’t available?

Probably not, as this is not a default functionality in Jira. Especially for larger companies where not all Jira users work at the same location, this might become a problem. Important topics might be left untouched if the person supposed to work on it is not in the office for some time. For sure, if you work in a small team and probably sit together in the same office, you know immediately who is available and who isn’t in.

But what about larger companies where you assign issues to someone you might not even know in person? Or someone located in an office somewhere far away, maybe even in a different time zone? It is not viable to send a parallel email to see if you get an out-of-office reply and thus to get to know if the person is in or not.

Solution

With our new app User Absence Planner for Jira you can bring those out of office notifications to Jira. More precisely, it helps to display and indicate for every Jira user, if the colleague is in or not, and even indicates if a user is currently online and logged in to Jira.

Every Jira user gets a new option on the user profile called absence planner. Absences of different type like holidays, business trip, or training participations can be added in advance. Individual absence messages for other team members can be inserted as well.

Navigation to absence planner

In Jira issues, an icon is displayed next to every user in

  • Assignee field

  • Reporter field

  • User custom fields

  • User mentions

This icon indicates if the user is online and available (green), not available (blue, absence currently set) or offline (grey). When hovering over that icon, the absence message is displayed. Also, if displaying the small user profile on mouse over, the absence details are displayed including absence type, period and message (if set).

Finally, the app provides powerful JQL functions to quickly search for issues with users in assignee or any other user field who are not in. This can be done either for today or for any other specific date. With these functions you can keep important issues on the radar which are assigned to users who aren't available.

User Absence Planner for Jira brings the ability to plan user absence times and communicate them efficiently to other team members. It helps to get things done on time without risk of assigning important issues to users who aren’t available.

The app is quite new and of course there are features we plan to add to the app in the future. The first users already brought in their feature requests and we try to implement as much as possible to satisfy all these needs.

If you want to give it a try, you can find a Server and Data Center version on the Atlassian Marketplace.

We would love to hear your feedback about it. Just write us an email to info@ij-soltuions.com or reach out via our Service Management.