Issue trackers, ticketing, and helpdesk systems are becoming essential tools for any organization to ensure timely and professional service toward partners, customers, and suppliers. Being able to closely track the completion of customers’ requests or project tasks is required to keep control of your organization and enhance the collaboration between all parts of the company.
Issues start to live on multiple systems, while we may think of multiple scenarios in which issue information must be shared. Think about:
- Cross-company collaboration
- Service Desk and development departments
- Migration scenario’s
- … actually, any department/organization that needs to collaborate over different issue trackers
Maintaining a consistent view of these distributed issues gets very cumbersome. There is a need for cross-organizational issue tracking allowing to achieve a unified view, of wherever the information is stored.
Luckily, there are multiple options to implement such cross-organization issue tracking;
different issue sync solutions are available to help solve this problem.
This blog series has the ambition to propose a framework of 7 questions against which these types of solutions can be weighted.
The list has been established based on 5+ years of experience with issue synchronization.
In this first blog, we will focus on the first question:
Flexibility
The sync solution has to be flexible for numerous reasons. Cross-organization issue tracking is always complex as it attempts to unify information between organizations or departments that may operate completely differently.
It must be possible to transform and map the information from one system to the context of the other system in any possible way, and this capability must be built into the system by design.
Even when a simple transformation is OK today, synchronization requirements tend to evolve. What is sufficient today, will not be sufficient tomorrow. If you want to avoid the need to deploy multiple solutions or convert existing solutions to new solutions—you’re far better off choosing the most flexible option.
Questions to ask
- What type of information can be exchanged?
- How complex is it to construct a complex scenario?
- Is it possible to synchronize contextual data of an issue (such as project, version, user information)?
- Is it possible to transition an issue when a certain comment is given?
- Are updates and deletions of comments, attachments, work logs supported?
- How do you handle different workflows?
How does Exalate handle Flexibility?
Exalate is one of the issue sync solution providers and is based on multiple years of expertise in the domain of synchronization. The product has been designed with full flexibility in mind.
Synchronization is bidirectional, and the configuration is distributed, so each side keeps full autonomy.
While Exalate supports simple, straightforward sync scenarios, it can also handle very complex business orchestrations.
There are no limits to sending information between different issue trackers, including standard fields, custom fields, attachments, comments, work logs, components, versions, agile fields, and service desk fields. Actually, Exalate uses a mechanism that allows sending any issue information to the other side. This means that also information from add-ons can be exchanged.
Additionally, Exalate uses a Groovy-based scripting engine to implement filtering, transformation, and mapping, which allows for the implementation of the most complex use cases. Think about unified workflows, send issues to different projects (based on a value), and migration projects, …
Each instance has full control over what is sent (filters) and how the information is consumed (transformations and mappings).
Want to know more, challenge us, book a meeting, and we’ll discuss your use case, or visit our documentation site to see it in practice.