JIRA Studio 2.1, the latest release of Atlassian’s hosted software development suite, introduced support for embedding documents in the latest Microsoft Office format (*.docx, *xlsx, *.pptx) into any project wiki page.
JIRA Studio’s wiki is based on Atlassian’s Confluence 3.1 enterprise wiki, a great tool for creating, sharing and working on rich content, for both technical and non-technical people involved in software projects.
Embedding a document into your wiki page is a great way to enable non-technical team owners like product managers and business analysts to continue using their preferred editing tools (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), while taking advantage of the collaboration features of the wiki to share ideas and gather feedback.
Documents like requirements, user manuals and training presentations are often emailed around for review and feedback. This approach can lead to heaps of problems including:
- Different people reading and commenting in different versions of the document.
- Excessive emails flying back and forth between everyone involved
- No shared history of the various questions, comments and ideas about the document
A better way to review documents
JIRA Studio’s wiki () offers a much better solution for discussing documents. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Attach and embed your document into the wiki page
You can attach any Office document through the familiar browser upload or by drag and drop into your browser window.
Once the document is attached, embed it into the page using the Macro browser and the Office Word macro:
It’s helpful to watch the page so you’ll receive email notifications whenever someone edits or comments on it:
Step 2 – Collect feedback
Instead of emailing the document to your team members, you can now just send them a link to the page, and people can have threaded discussions in the page comments:
Step 3 – Revise the document and update the wiki
With a watch set on the page, you’ll receive email notifications whenever the page is updated or commented:
After revising the document, you can attach your latest version to the page. The wiki will store all previous revisions of the document as long as the filename isn’t changed:
Turning requirements into reality
If you’re working on a requirements document, you’ll want to take advantage of JIRA Studio’s agile planning features to plan and track the features during implementation.
A simple way to provide detailed requirements to the implementation team is to create an issue and then link to your wiki page that has the detailed requirements as well as the previous discussion about them.
Want to learn more about JIRA Studio’s wiki?
JIRA Studio currently includes Confluence 3.1, with tons more useful features that your team can take advantage of. Check it out!