Create a two-way workflow between Jira issues and Salesforce Legal records

Owned by Mark Kleinsmith
Last updated: May 01, 2024 by Jeff Gleeson
3 min read

As a services manager, you receive requests often from different customers with different needs. Once you prepare a statement of work(SOW), you will need to access the legal team for final contract/proposal preparation. You'll now want to have a seamless workflow between the services team (working on Jira) and the legal team (who are working on Salesforce).

This use case shows you how to build a bidirectional workflow between Salesforce and Jira using Connector for Salesforce & Jira. Together with Jira's built-in functions like custom fields, workflows, post-functions, and Automation for Jira.

Ingredients

You will need the following installed on your Jira environment. This works for both Jira Cloud and Jira Server.

You will need some basic understanding on the following Jira features:

Complete scenario

The Teams:

  1. The team that resides on Salesforce is the Legal team.

  2. The team that resides on Jira is the support and services team

The Scenario:

  1. A customer reaches out to the organization's support team seeking their assistance.

  2. Support/Services then creates an internal Jira ticket for their request of a SOW/pre-contract.

  3. The created Jira ticket is synced with a Legal Case in Salesforce.

  4. The Legal team will find new Case created in Salesforce and work on them.

  5. The Legal team updates the object in Salesforce once they have provided what they need and it'll automatically get updated in Jira.

  6. The Services team that is working with the customer can now update the customer with the information that they need.

Building this use case

⚙️ Part 1 Setup Salesforce

  1. We will be using the Case object. To make things easier across the teams that use Salesforce, we will be creating a Record Type in Salesforce and label it as Legal Case

  2. Navigate to Setup > Object Manager > Case > Record Types


  3. Add a new Record Type: Legal Case

  4. This will then show up on the object as Case Record Type to differentiate what type of Case is it:

  5. From the Case Settings screen shown in step 2, you can also navigate to Fields & Relationships to add new fields, such as Contract Type, Contract Due Date, and so on.

  6. You can add a field namely Pending for Legal? to act as a middleman. It is a Picklist field in Salesforce and it only has “Yes” and “No” options. We’ll touch more on this later in the Jira’s configuration section.

⚙️ Part 2 Setup Jira

There are a few things that need to be configured in Jira:
Custom Fields

  1. You will need to create the counterpart fields that you have created for in Salesforce. For example, if you have created a field for Contract Type in Salesforce, you need to do the same in Jira by creating a Select List (Single Choice) field type and have the same values for the field.

  2. As mentioned in step 6 on the Salesforce configuration part, we created a field named “Pending for Legal?”, now we are creating the counterpart for it in Jira as well.

  3. Once all of the custom fields have been created on both platforms, you can map these fields in the Bindings.

  4. To do that, navigate to Apps > Salesforce > Bindings, click on Mapping for the project you’re linking it to, click Mappings for the issue type that you want to map these fields:

⚙️ Part 3 Setup Workflow Status/Post-function

  1. Create 2 statuses in Jira by navigating to Settings > Issues > Statuses. We created 2 statuses: Waiting for Legal and Waiting for Jira Team

  2. We added these 2 statuses to the workflow of the project:

  3. Click on the transition to the Waiting for Legal status, and a pop-up will appear on the right as shown in the screenshot above.

  4. Click on Post Functions

  5. We added 2 Post Functions: Update Issue Custom Field and Push to Salesforce

    1. The Update Issue Custom Field is to update the Pending for Legal? field to Yes whenever this transition is made

    2. The Push to Salesforce is to automatically push the mapped fields to Salesforce

⚙️ Part 4 Automation for Jira

We need to add an automation to enable the ability to transition the issue in Jira from Salesforce.

  1. Navigate to Settings > System > Automation Rule


  2. Click Create Rule on the top right

  3. Select the Field Value Changed trigger and search for Pending for Legal? field. Click Save.


  4. Select New Condition.


  5. Select User condition and select User who triggered the event for the User field, Is for the Check to perform field, Salesforce & Jira Cloud Connector for the Criteria field:


  6. After saving, click New action:


  7. Select Transition issue:


  8. Choose Waiting for Jira Team for the Destination Status. Click Save.


  9. Click Turn it on