JIRA Service Desk 2.0 Comes With New Features and Pricing

NB! Please note that Atlassian products are developed rapidly. The product features listed in the article may change over time.

As an Atlassian expert since 2008, we have seen many clients use JIRA as a service desk tool, but not Atlassian JIRA's own Service Desk extension and it's possibilities.

JIRA Service Desk is an awesome add-on to an already great product.
 

And now the most important changes in version 2.0.
 

New features and a new licensing model

The new version combines an intuitive JIRA experience with powerful SLA management and real-time reporting, making the system more efficient than before.
 

An intuitive, user-friendly experience 

Among the changes are improvements to the customer portal, customizable queues and agent based queues. You can see exactly what you need. The interface is clear and understandable to everyone. IT teams get to speak in their language and customers get to speak in theirs.

The customer portal has now been redesigned to support subsets of request types, which can be useful in a multiple departments’ scenario. Service Desk 2.0 also includes its own e-mail handler for incoming issues. It makes sense to create a separate request type for incoming e-mail issues and hide it from the portal view.
 

Customizable queues

Queue changes ensure that everyone in your team is working on the right requests at the right time. Queues are powered by the flexible JIRA Query Language (JQL). Queues help your team to handle requests in real-time as they arrive, which means no more manual work and request prioritization is required.

We tried the feature out and found the improved queues to be really great. JQL works fine and dandy as well. There are also several plug-ins available for advanced JQL queries, e.g. finding issues with links etc. 
 

Advanced SLA's and metrics

You can now set up advanced SLA metrics, report on performance in real-time and drive your team forward with highly visible SLA targets. SLA metrics are also based on JQL queries and support custom calendars, which is handy in a holiday scenario, among others.
 

Cheaper pricing model

Important change from the licensing side is the transformation from user-based licensing model to an agent-based licensing model. Your service desk customers are now free and you only need to pay for customer service agent licenses (and of course for JIRA itself).
 

Upgrading to JIRA Service Desk 2.0 makes sense

The new version gives you much more functionality for a reduced price. There simply isn't a reason why should not hop on the upgrade train.

We ourselves have moved from SD 1 to SD 2 and have been working under the hood of both JIRA and JIRA Service Desk, implementing JIRA SD to an ITIL based 10 000+ user government organization for well over a year now.

We'll post a more thorough case study in the future. Meanwhile, keep in touch, share this article and subscribe to our newsletter!