What's new

We are happy to announce version 3 of our app Outlook Email for Jira! This is the biggest update so far, so please make sure to familiarize yourself with all the changes.

There is also a guide for administrators: Upgrade Guide.

New features

A modern look and feel

With this version we are adopting the new Atlassian Design Guidelines. This helps users which are new to Jira to feel right at home.

Open

In addition, we have also redesigned the ribbon icons, to match our own branding better and to make it clearer what the buttons actually do.

Open

You can now also drag and drop files to most UI locations, e.g. the dialogs and the sidebar.

Sidebar

With the new version we are also bringing the sidebar to all our users 🎉. This feature has been available for some time for users on Office 365, and since it has been so well received, we decided to make this available for everyone (yes, even on Outlook 2010). The sidebar allows you to quickly look up the status of linked Jira issues and to update them from Outlook.

If you want to learn more about this feature, best check our in-depth article here: Issue Sidebar Tutorial

Improved connectivity

One of the biggest pain points with the old add-in was the clumsy way it handled logins. When we first started, we wanted to make it as easy as possible to login to Jira (without entering your URL). However, this lead to a lot of issues for customers with multiple Jira systems, especially in larger corporations.

The new version now allows you to login to any system and even multiple Jira systems at the same time! Learn more here.

Rich text editor

Another big improvement comes with the support for a rich text editor. Previously, if you wanted to take over email formatting like tables, you had a very hard time editing the Jira markup manually. With the new text editor, you’ll be able to edit the content much better before creating the issue - it also supports @-mentions!

Improved Jira Service Desk support

If you are using the Outlook Email for Jira app for a Jira Service Desk project, you’ll also benefit from a few improvements!

• Creating issues will now default to using request types - you still have the option to switch back to issue types though.

• Fields will now be split into two parts, “Service Portal” fields and all fields. This allows you to quickly see which fields are visible to customers and need to be provided - if you don’t need the distinction, there is also an option to turn this off.

• We now support the request participants field.

Appointment / meeting support

We added the ability to create issues based on appointments & meetings in your Outlook calendar. In addition, if you are using our Outlook Meetings for Jira app to schedule meetings from Jira, you’ll also be able to view the issue on these meetings.

Improved stability & performance

Our previous add-in was built more than five years ago, so after going through support for many major Outlook version (2010-2019) it became more and more unstable over time. We randomly saw Outlook crashes or glitches for single users, with no indication to the cause.

When we built the new version from the ground up, we made it as lean as possible. It now only uses a fraction of resources as before and is much more stable in all environments. Irregardless of the version of your Outlook, it should never bog down your Outlook anymore.

High DPI support

As mentioned in the previous section, the old version was built on ancient technology (it may as well have involved dinos 🦕). So if you were using a high DPI screen (e.g. 4k or more), you probably had a quite bad time using our add-in. But fear not! We thoroughly tested the new version on those displays.

Here’s proof:

Secure by default

Our old add-in behaved the same way for Jira Server and Jira Cloud. While that meant less work for us, a lot of you were dissatisfied that some functions involved using our cloud infrastructure. We have good news! If you are using Jira Server, no (well... next to none) external service is required anymore. We do not send or collect any of those:

• Personal user information (GDPR, …)

• Data from your Jira system

• Data from your Outlook inbox

Deprecated / not yet available

We are pretty happy with the release we are shipping today, though not everything made the cut just yet. Based on usage and to achieve the of the above mentioned priorities (stability, security), we needed to cut off some features. These are detailed below, please make sure to provide us feedback if anything you are relying on is missing!