TimeZone assistant

Inspiration

Supporting end users is not only a matter of time but also a matter of building a relationship with a person. The personal touch is important. While talking to our JSM agents, we noticed that sometimes they have to go as far as checking linedin profiles to understand reporters' locations to be able to personalize the message or schedule a call with them. Why don't we conveniently show the reporters location? Another point was about marketing best practices: why do marketers care when their emails are delivered while support agents are fine with sending a reply in the middle of the receiver's night? This is how the idea for TimeZone assistant app appeared.

What it does

For JSM:

Shows time and time zones of the reporter (in case of having a portal account) and the agent to support agents
Shows time difference between the reporter’s and the agent’s time zones
Shows part of the day (night, day, evening)
Provide an ability to schedule comment/reply to the reporter. Adds a greeting appropriate for the scheduled time of replying.

How we built it

This is our first Forge app. We used only React + Forge. The process went pretty smoothly.

Challenges we ran into

Setting up the development environment. Forge tunnel was not suitable for us, because we wanted to have full control over webpack configuration and have a hot reload during development. In order to do so we had to mock Jira api responses and develop outside of Jira iframe. Then indicate /build directory in the manifest, run build script and forge tunnel to test it in the iframe.
Another challenge was to post comments on behalf of the user. Unfortunately, we encountered auth problem and did a compromise and decide to post them on behalf of the app. It would be great if performing actions on behalf of the current user will become possible in the future.
Autoscaling for dynamic content is not available, we had to reserve some space for the content appearing dynamically (scheduling comments). This problem has not been resolved yet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The scheduler has been done by using Forge, similar functionality in our Connect apps required at least 2 external services.

What we learned

Forge is pretty cool :) It requires a little bit more effort to set up the environment, but on the other hand provides us with useful functionalities like CLI, scheduled and web triggers. It also seems like Forge offers more extension points and it's easier to manage them in the manifest file (which we like a lot) than it was in Atlassian-connect.