“What is the ‘secret save button’ of the Atlassian World?” Find out on this episode of Appfire Presents: The BEST IT Service Management Show by Appfire. Appfire’s own Kelsey LaMastres stops by to talk with Emily Peet-Lukes about how backups and configurations can really save your bacon (metaphorically speaking).
About the guest
Kelsey LaMastres is the Lead Product Marketing Manager for Appfire’s Administrative Tools suite of apps, including Configuration Manager for Jira, the most trusted app for Jira change management. She is an Atlassian Accredited Sales Professional and prior to joining Appfire, she worked in various marketing and technical support roles. Throughout her career, she has focused on delivering value to customers through amazing products and experiences.
About the show
The BEST ITSM Show by Appfire brings you expert insights for IT service delivery, so your employees and customers have what they need to succeed. Get the right tech and tips for the right job at hand. Look like you’ve come from the future with all your new ITSM smarts. Every episode is a brisk 10 minutes—less time than it takes to provision a laptop or troubleshoot a tech support issue.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:
What is the ‘secret save button’ of the Atlassian World?
Emily: Today we will be talking about the secret save button of the Atlassian world. Joining me is Appfire’s own Kelsey LaMastres, the lead product marketing manager for the admin tools category of apps. Stick around because we’ll be back with 10 minutes of awesome content.
Hello, Kelsey.
Kelsey: Hello. Thank you for having me.
Emily: Welcome. Tell us, what is the secret save button of the Atlassian world? We’re dying to know.
Kelsey: It’s maybe a secret for some, not a secret for all.
Configuration Manager for Jira is an awesome tool that can be equated to a save button in Jira. Basically, in a nutshell, this is an app that lets you take a snapshot of your Jira configurations, your projects, data, basically anything in that system, and save it for later. It’s great. It’s similar to a save button on a computer. You want to save things so you can access them later or move them to another location. That’s what we’re talking about with the secret save button.
Emily: Very cool. Can you tell us a little bit more about why it’s useful?
Kelsey: Sure. One of the reasons that you want to save things in general is so that you can access them later. Some organizations need to keep backup copies of their Jira configurations on a regular basis for things like compliance or data standards. Maybe they’re adhering to ITIL practices, we’re talking about ITSM, so that’s a very common reason. People might have to save their Jira configurations and move them to a CMDB, configuration management database. CMJ allows them to click that save button, move things over to a database, and stay in compliance.
Emily: That’s awesome. We love to be able to save the things that we need. We all have those issues where we just want to hold onto it and make sure it doesn’t go away while we do other things, so that’s great.
Can you let us know other ways that this app may be useful for ITSM organizations?
Kelsey: Sure. One of the more popular use cases for the app, and actually the reason the app was created, is for change management. This is the idea of rolling out change in a really safe way.
If you think about ITSM and organizations that are maybe going through IT modernization, they may be looking to overhaul their IT processes, or maybe they’ve identified some areas that could be improved in those processes, it’s how you make those changes without disrupting your business.
If it’s things like a Jira workflow or screens that you’re wanting to change, you can use CMJ to actually save those configurations, move them to test or staging environments, implement the change, test those changes with sophisticated QA process, and then once everything looks as it should and you’re happy with it, you can move those changes back to your production environment in a way that is very predictable and minimizes downtime and risk for your organization.
Emily: That’s really cool. I feel like a lot of organizations maybe are hesitant to modernize some of their processes because they’re afraid of losing all of the work that they’ve done before or anything, having double entries or other things. This sounds like it really helps to prevent that from happening.
Kelsey: Exactly.
Emily: Fascinating. What else might an organization be able to use this app for?
Kelsey: One example that comes to mind in this ITSM space, many organizations have IT service management, but perhaps a newer area is enterprise service management, which I know Faith has been on the show to talk about in episodes past. This is the idea of applying IT service management practices to other areas of your business, like finance or HR. Rather than having an employee send a Slack message to request time off, they can use a sophisticated tool like Jira Service Management to submit that request.
Where CMJ might be beneficial is if you have well-oiled processes for your IT team in terms of service management, you could use that for project templates or applying similar workflows to those new areas of your business. Saving time from those organizations having to set up from the very beginning. You’ll able to share those best practices and learnings and processes from what is working well in your business from ITSM and applying it to ESM.
Emily: That’s great. It sounds like a great way to elevate every section of a company’s organization and all of their practices.
Kelsey: Yes.
Emily: Cool. What else should people know about this app? Is there anything else it does besides saving and moving things?
Kelsey: Yes. Migrations is actually a really popular use case for the app. Some things that people may not know about Configuration Manager are that it comes with two other apps made by Appfire, and they all three work really well together.
One of those is what we call Integrity Check for Jira. This is basically a little bit more advanced version of the integrity checker that comes with Jira. It enables you to scan your entire Jira system, perhaps a specific subset of projects, or even what’s in that snapshot file that we talked about earlier, to look for broken configurations. That’s really helpful because you don’t want to save things and move things to a new system if there are breakages in them because then you introduce those broken configurations in the new system.
Emily: Right.
Kelsey: So, it helps you identify and resolve those errors ahead of time.
The other app that comes with it is Power Admin. I like to think of this as the magnifying glass for Jira. It allows you to get up close and personal with your configurations. You can search for them by name or by type and take a look holistically about how things like custom fields, workflows, screens, how all of that is being used across your Jira system and identify areas where you could clean up and maybe improve system performance.
If you have similar custom fields used in different places across your system, you can use the app to merge those and just have one. If something is in use by zero projects, it will elevate that to you as the admin and you can delete those and clean up your system that way. It’s kind of that next level for businesses of making sure they’re really in control of their configurations and able to be really sophisticated with their processes.
Emily: We have time for one more question. Are there any other use cases for this app that you’d like to share with us?
Kelsey: Sure. I touched on the migration piece very briefly earlier, but a lot of people are migrating to Cloud right now or migrating off of Server and into Data Center. If we apply that same save analogy, CMJ is great for migrations. You can move entire systems or if you’re moving in phases and you want to move specific subsets of the organization, specific projects at one time, you have the flexibility to do that. It’s compatible across hosting types, whether you’re going to Data Center or Cloud, and great for organizations that are moving to Cloud.
Emily: Perfect. Sounds like a super dynamic app and something that everyone can benefit from. I love that.
Kelsey: Yes. It’s one of my favorites.
Emily: That’s so great. Kelsey, thanks so much for being here today to talk with us about the secret save button of the Atlassian world. This has been Appfire presents The Best ITSM Show by Appfire. You can find more episodes at Hub.Appfire.com.
Thanks again for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
Last updated: 2023-06-05
Emily Peet-Lukes
See all content by Emily Peet-Lukes
