JIRA Confluence Integration: A Comprehensive Guide

In order to successfully execute a project, you need to collaborate with different teams, complete many interrelated tasks and meet all the common goals. However, managing everything on your own can be tedious, error-prone, and exhausting. This way, Project Management can often be a challenging task. So, how can you maximize your chances of achieving your project goal? The best way is to get your hands on a few Project Management tools, such as JIRA and Confluence, that will help you stay organized, manage all those moving pieces, and meet your goal on time.

This article will take you through the JIRA Confluence Integration used by companies to manage agile projects with organized workflows. JIRA is a popular and flexible Project Management tool that comes with powerful capabilities of bug and issue tracking. Confluence on the other hand is all about collaboration. Confluence is a Project Management tool built for storing, sharing, and organizing your project. Even though JIRA and Confluence might seem like different products, JIRA Confluence Integration is everything your team needs to manage and organize agile projects, saving you time and helping you grow faster. Before diving right into the JIRA Confluence integration, let’s discuss both platforms in brief.

Table of Contents

• What is JIRA?
  • Key Features of JIRA
• What is Confluence?
  • Key Features of Confluence
• Why do we need JIRA Confluence Integration?
• Prerequisites
• JIRA Confluence Integration: Step by Step
  • Setting up the Confluence Jira Integration via Application Links
  • Setting up Direct Links between JIRA Projects and Confluence Spaces
  • Creating JIRA Issues from Confluence
  • Displaying JIRA Issues in Confluence
  • Reporting JIRA Information on Confluence Pages
• Apps for JIRA Confluence Integration
• Conclusion

What is JIRA?

Launched in 2002 by an Australian company called Atlassian, JIRA is a Cloud-based Project Management tool initially designed for Bug Tracking. Since then, JIRA has been constantly improvising and the more current versions now include non-IT Project Management, Agile Project Management, and Service Desk Features.

JIRA offers a subscription-based model that allows teams to manage, organize, and collaborate on projects. With JIRA, you can track and improve the overall progress of your project. JIRA is fully customizable and also comes with predefined templates for you to get started without any hassle. You can further customize the workflows as per the needs of your team and business.

It simplifies the collaboration with various other tools and makes it easier to monitor and launch new software products. JIRA is trusted and used by over 65,000 companies all over the world for its excellent flexibility and Project Management approach.

Key Features of JIRA

Let’s have a look at some of the most prominent features of JIRA.

• Enterprise-Grade Security: All Atlassian Cloud-based products use Bank-Grade Security and centralized administration to protect data and files from threats and breaches. Default Authorization Scheme allows teams to securely collaborate on projects.
• Reports: JIRA allows users to visualize information by generating reports. JIRA gives you access to many reports that can help you to gain insights into a project’s progress. 
• Workflow Customization: JIRA is fully customizable and allows users to customize Workflow, Reports, Scrum Boards, and other components easily. Moreover, JIRA offers great versatility and is useful for Project Management, Issue Tracking, and Task Management. 
• Robust Integration Support: JIRA allows integration with various third-party services and apps through a variety of REST and JAVA APIs (Application Programming Interface). Atlassian Marketplace allows you to integrate with various listed applications to extend JIRA’s functionality.

What is Confluence?

Confluence, also developed by Atlassian, is a team workspace that helps in collaboration among different teams working on a project. Fast-moving companies use Confluence to transform how they work together. Confluence is a single source of truth for top performing-teams to keep everyone organized and collaborate on projects company-wide. You can use Confluence to evolve the Project Requirements, Document Diagrams, build Organization Charts and even build Support Documentation.

Everything in Confluence is organized by “Pages” and “Spaces”. You can use Confluence to create a page and even manage the discussion in the page’s comments section. This ensures a seamless decision-making process and ensures responsiveness to change.

Key Features of Confluence

Let’s have a look at some of the most prominent features of Confluence.

• Pages and Spaces: Pages are the documents where your team can create, edit and discuss work in the comments section. Spaces are the containers that hold all the important pages for your team, group, project, or just you.
• Inline Comments: This feature allows you to just highlight a piece of text over the page, and you can add a comment accordingly and have a whole discussion on it.
• Collaboration: Confluence allows you to restrict viewing and editing rights for these pages. You can set up all levels of collaborations within Confluence, be it setting up a page just for you or opening it to everyone. Confluence allows you to further share the page with specific people and tag other users as well.
• Diagramming Tools: Cloud-based diagramming tools have direct integrations into Confluence. Confluence lets you create Process Flow Diagrams and Architecture Diagrams. You can embed the diagramming tools and use them directly in Confluence.

Now that you have a basic understanding of both the Project Management platforms, let’s dive straight into the JIRA Confluence Integration.

Why do we need JIRA Confluence Integration?

A Project Management tool enhances Team Collaboration, Team Communication and streamlines the entire Project Management journey. It helps you with all kinds of information, like what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and what progress the project is making. If you’re planning a project and you do have lots of information that you need to get across to people, a JIRA Confluence Integration really helps. 

It is desired to set up a JIRA Confluence Integration if you want to have a smooth and hassle-free Project Management experience. A JIRA Confluence Integration leverages the task tracking and Project Management capabilities of JIRA combined with the document management abilities of Confluence. Here are some of the important benefits that you can derive from this integration.

• A JIRA Confluence Integration improves communication between different teams in an organization. It connects the Technical Teams working on Jira, with the Business Teams on Confluence.
• You can use Jira and Confluence together to manage agile projects with organized workflows and task tracking offered by JIRA, and integrated document management offered by Confluence.
• The integration offers real-time sync between both the platforms, and a centralized space, often called a single source of truth, to organize requirements, release notes, tasks, and goals.
• It saves you a lot of time by allowing you to plan, work, execute ideas, and generate reports on tasks and workflows in JIRA directly from Confluence.

After reading this article, you’ll be able to set up JIRA Confluence Integration in no time. The integration is pretty much straightforward and requires no programming experience.

Prerequisites

To set up a JIRA Confluence Integration, you’re expected to have:

• A JIRA Account.
• A Confluence Account.
• Working Knowledge of JIRA.
• Working Knowledge of Confluence.

Note: You must have admin privileges on both Jira and Confluence to establish this connection.

JIRA Confluence Integration: Step by Step

JIRA and Confluence are both Atlassian products and therefore they do link up quite well together. There are many ways to seamlessly integrate JIRA and Confluence. Follow the below-mentioned steps to set up the integration.

• Setting up the Confluence Jira Integration via Application Links
• Setting up Direct Links between JIRA Projects and Confluence Spaces
• Creating JIRA Issues from Confluence
• Displaying JIRA Issues in Confluence
• Reporting JIRA Information on Confluence Pages

Setting up the Confluence Jira Integration via Application Links

The JIRA Confluence Integration is pretty much straightforward.

• To establish the integration, log in to your Confluence Cloud.
• On the home page, you’ll see the “Settings” gear. Click on it and open “General configuration” under “CONFLUENCE ADMINISTRATION”.

• Click on the “Application Links” tab located in the left sidebar. The configuration page will be displayed.

• Enter the URL of your JIRA instance in the space provided and click on “Create new link” to connect it to Confluence.
• Check “The servers have the same set of users…” to configure this link using OAuth (with impersonation) authentication.
• After finishing the configuration, you can see the link between JIRA and Confluence displayed on the “Configure Application Links” page.

With that done, your Jira Confluence integration is good to go.

Setting up Direct Links between JIRA Projects and Confluence Spaces

Direct Links help you to quickly switch between Confluence and JIRA screens using Sidebar Shortcuts.

To add a Direct Link to a JIRA Project into a Confluence Space, follow these steps.

• Copy the URL of your JIRA page that you want Confluence to connect to.
• Navigate back to the related Confluence Space and click on the “Add shortcut” tab in the sidebar.

• Paste the JIRA URL in the space provided and give a name to the shortcut.

• Click on “Add shortcut” and then save the shortcut.
• The shortcut will now be displayed in the sidebar, making it easy for you to navigate to the JIRA Project.

Now, let’s add a Direct Link to a Confluence Page into JIRA. To do so, follow the below-mentioned steps.

• Click on the “Overview” tab located in the sidebar of your Confluence Space.
• Click on the “Share” button and copy the page link.

• Navigate back to the related JIRA Project and click on the “Add item” tab located in the sidebar.

• From the list, select “Shortcut”.
• Paste the link of the Confluence page in the space provided and give a name to the shortcut.

• Click on the “Add” button and the link appears on the JIRA sidebar.
• To further extend the functionality of the connection, click on “Pages” from the JIRA sidebar.

• To link a Confluence Space, click on the “Connect a space” button.
• Select the Confluence Space you want to connect and click on “Connect”.

We now have Direct Links in both Confluence and JIRA, making it easy for you to navigate between them. Now, you can also create pages in the Confluence Space directly from within JIRA.

Creating JIRA Issues from Confluence

To create JIRA Epic from within a Confluence Page, follow the steps below.

• From the Confluence Page, click on the “Edit” icon.

• Place the cursor in the body of the page and click on the “Insert” icon located in the top panel.

• From the drop-down click on the “JIRA Issue/Filter” macro. A macro Dialog Box will be displayed.
• Click on “Create New Issue” and select the desired JIRA Project. Set the “Issue Type” to “Epic”.

• Fill in the required details and give an “Epic Name”.
• Click on “Insert”.

An Epic is automatically created in the JIRA Project and an Issue Link is inserted into the Confluence Page.

Now, to create a JIRA Issue from within Confluence, follow the steps.

• Highlight some text on the page and click on the “Create issue” icon from the pop-up.

• Select the desired JIRA Project and select any “Issue Type”.

• Fill in the description of the issue and make sure that the “Link to epic” box is checked.
• Click on “Create”.

After the links are displayed on the Confluence page, clicking on them will directly take you to JIRA.

Displaying JIRA Issues in Confluence

You can display a JIRA Issue in Confluence by directly pasting the Issue URL into the body of the Confluence Page Editor. Confluence automatically converts the URL to a JIRA Issue/Filter macro link. To display a JIRA Issue manually, follow the below steps.

• From the Confluence Page, click on the “Edit” icon.
• Place the cursor in the body of the page and click on the “Insert” icon located in the top panel.

• From the drop-down click on the “JIRA Issue/Filter” macro. A macro Dialog Box will be displayed.

• You can search for a specific JIRA Issue in the search box or paste the URL of the JIRA Issue or use a JQL Query to select an issue.
• You can also configure the “Display options” to display multiple issues in the way you want to.

• Select the issues you want to be displayed and click on “Insert”.

This is how you can use JIRA Issue/Filter macro to display the issues in Confluence.

Reporting JIRA Information on Confluence Pages

To create Charts and Report Pages that provide insight into JIRA Projects within Confluence, follow these steps.

• Create a new Confluence Page by clicking on the “+” icon located in the sidebar.
• Search and select “JIRA report”. Click on “Next”.

• Select “Status report” as the Report Type and click on “Next”.

• Select the JIRA Project you want to report on, and give a Title to it.
• Click on “Switch to advanced” to report on specific JIRA Epics or Issues.

• Click on “Create”.

The Blueprint automatically creates a pre-configured Status Report Page that contains charts and information pertaining to the JIRA Project. Click on “Add JIRA Report” to add and create more reports.

Apps for JIRA Confluence Integration

You can also leverage third-party apps to integrate JIRA and Confluence. They make things easier and extend the functionality of the integration. Below are a few apps you can consider to establish the JIRA Confluence Integration.

• Issue Macro from Jira to Confluence gives you full control over how you want to display the JIRA Issues in Confluence. You can use JQL to filter and sort the issues.
• Team Calendars for Confluence allows you to plan ahead with Timeline Calendars. You can monitor the issues and activities in JIRA, and also pull up issues over specified date ranges.
• Advanced Jira Issue Insert Macro allows you to insert JIRA Issues into a Confluence Page. It also allows you to customize your Confluence page with its features.

Conclusion

Project Management is a challenging task, but with a few Project Management tools by your side, the entire journey of Project Management has become flawless. Two of the most popular Project Management Software, JIRA and Confluence, are used by fast-moving companies to transform the workflow process. In this article, you were introduced to two Atlassian products, JIRA and Confluence. You were provided a detailed guide on how to set up a JIRA Confluence Integration.

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Do you use JIRA or Confluence? Share your experience of working with JIRA Confluence Integration in the comments section below.