App Awareness Month – JIRA

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week, we’re focusing on applications that make collaboration easier and provide seamless document management. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

JIRA – Build and Launch Great Software

Atlassian OnDemand brings the award-winning JIRA software development tools to the cloud via Google Apps. The third-party application, found in the Google Apps Marketplace, allows users to access familiar development tools directly from a user’s Google Apps account. With JIRA, users can view project status via a centralized dashboard, track bugs, link issues to related source code, plan development sprints, monitor project progress and report development status as well as make comments on existing work.

Integration with Google Apps

The product’s deep integration with Google Apps for Business provides numerous additional features for Apps users including real time communication with project collaborators and the ability to create, collaborate on and embed Google Docs into build issues. Additionally, an integration with Google Calendar keeps developers and builds on schedule. “OpenSocial Gadgets” give you the added  ability to easily create and customize dashboards to organize your work.

Why We Like It

Our team of developers works in JIRA every day. The application’s single sign on features and integration with Google Apps make it extremely accessible and simple to set up and start using. With a development team spread out in two countries and three cities, team members in New York, Atlanta and Buenos Aires are able to track progress seamlessly. The product’s numerous integrations with Google Apps keep BetterCloud’s developers on schedule and organized, while giving everyone quick and simple visibility into different projects via dashboard summaries.

We also use Fisheye, another Atlassian product that integrates with JIRA, to track changes in source code, commits to fixes and general version history. FishEye allows our team to collaborate more effectively by providing everyone with annotated source code, which provides context to issues. And since FishEye and JIRA are web apps, nearly everything in the app is conveniently a linkable URL, so our team can easily refer to very specific pieces of code in email or chat when needed.

JIRA can be downloaded from the Google Apps Marketplace by your domain’s administrator and can be customized to suit your organization’s needs with an array of a la carte features. Atlassian offers pricing plans based on team size, from 10 users to 2,000+, the application is truly affordable for any organization, large or small.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: It’s a great tool for project management and integrates with several Google Apps features

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.