How to Optimize Your User Profiles on Jira & Confluence
User profiles play a crucial role in empowering collaboration across Jira and Confluence. When users can display their personal details (name, email address, etc.) and profile pictures, the work environment becomes a lot warmer and more interactive, indirectly increasing the likelihood of collaboration.
Unfortunately, out-of-box Jira and Confluence user profiles have limited functionalities, often leaving users wanting for more. If you’re a system admin looking to improve your existing user profiles, check out a few simple ways you can get started below.
Personalize The User Experience
As you can see, the default user profiles for Confluence (and Jira as well) only provide visibility of basic details such as full name, email, phone, company position, department, location, etc.
Consider adding custom information such as skills, expertise, and particular roles to these profiles for a more personalized work environment using an app like User Profiles for Confluence and User Profiles for Jira. For example, let’s say you’re a PHP expert. You could add that to your profile under “skills,” The next time your colleagues have any PHP-related questions, they can filter their search by anyone who has PHP listed under “skills, ” which would lead them to you.
Besides improved personalization, the custom fields can also improve existing workflows in both Jira and Confluence. For instance, it can help project managers who struggle extracting reports from specific Jira issues because of the difficulties in searching for those Jira issues. By adding custom fields such as team or department to existing user profiles, they can filter Jira issues by these custom fields and get what they need in less time.
You can also empower your Jira Service Management agents to handle requests efficiently and prioritize issues by building optimized queues based on enhanced user profile data. For example, you can add custom user information (like the reporter’s department) to your definition of the “fast lane.” Or you could even divide requests based on the reporter’s country and its current regulations.
Automate Information Updates
User profiles are only useful in providing accurate and relevant information. Unfortunately, updating their company user profile tends to fall pretty far down the list of many employees’ priorities.
As a system admin, you can automate this process by synchronizing your Jira/Confluence user profiles to an external user directory like LDAP, Active Directory, or Azure AD using an app like User Profiles for Confluence and User Profiles for Jira. After you do so, updates to the user directory will automatically appear in the user profiles. This can save you valuable time manually updating information like emails, phone numbers, or profile pictures.
Increase Profile Visibility
Having good and relevant user profiles does not necessarily mean that users can easily view or access that information. Increase the visibility of your user profiles by creating contact person macros for them. Simply tag these macros to a news or project page to showcase the colleagues in charge of a topic, which makes contacting them a breeze.
Consider integrating your user profiles on Confluence with Microsoft Teams using an app like User Profiles for Confluence, so that users can directly reach out to their intended recipient with one click. This will save your employees valuable time when toggling between apps.
Optimizing User Profiles is Easy
Out-of-box Confluence/Jira profiles are a good start to improve collaboration. Take it a step further with the recommendations above by personalizing your profiles, automating profile updates, and improving the visibility of your user profiles. You can easily accomplish these tasks by using tools like User Profiles for Confluence and User Profiles for Jira. If you’re ready to level up your user profiles on Confluence and/or Jira, click on the links below to get started!