Integration
Information systems routinely have more bricks than the Queen has hats. In addition to its intrinsic qualities as a task tracker, a key reason for JIRA’s success is its ability to integrate with numerous tools (CRMs such as Salesforce, service desks such Zendesk, test management platforms such as Zephyr, continuous integration servers such as Bamboo, knowledge bases such as Confluence etc.) These integrations are often the works of third-party editors, whom have always been major actors of the Atlassian ecosystem.
Go2Group
Let’s focus on GoToGroup, a US-based Atlassian Platinum Expert with offices in Tokyo, Japan and Beijing, China. Go2Group shares similarities with Valiantys: strong consulting services coupled with software edition and distribution.
Right from its inception, Go2Group dedicated itself to integrating JIRA with other applications:
- JaM Quality Center creates dynamic, bidirectionnal links between JIRA issues and HP QC test cases, improving collaboration between development and testing.
- Perforce for JIRA creates Perforce jobs from JIRA issues. Again, bidirectionnal synchronisation is possible, as well as automatic job creation from issues.
- Integrating JIRA and DOORS, IBM’s requirements management tool: a single (or mutliple) Doors requirement can be synced to a single JIRA issue or to multiple JIRA issues. Yet again, custom fields synchronisation and ‘bulk pulling’ of Doors requirements are at the tips of your fingers.
- JIRA doesn’t feature advanced reporting natively. Whereas Valiantys’s solution is based on BIRT technology, Go2Group’s Crystal Reports connector allows reports developped in Crystal Reports to be run from within the JIRA interface.
In keeping with the spirit of Atlassian’s ecosystem, Go2Group develops and maintains free plugins:
- Google Analytics for Confluence provides a deeper understanding of your Confluence use. The plugin tracks all user activities in Confluence, along with a number of key activities related to pages, blogs, attachments, and search queries.
- HipChat is a hosted IM and group chat solution for SMEs, for which Atlassian has released a plugin. Go2Group offers several adaptations of this plugin: an enhanced version for JIRA, another one for Fisheye/Crucible, another for Stash, not forgetting Confluence .
- Go2Group shares several small tools to interface with:
- ClearCase: a stand-in for the cleartool command during commits will present the user with a list of JIRA issues to link to a ClearCase commit:
- ClearQuest: a lightweight two-way integration between JIRA and ClearQuest.
- Borland Silk Test.
- Let’s mention a method to use client certificates for authentication, without a password, for JIRA, Bamboo and Confluence.
- The CRM Connector for Confluence allows Confluence users to view information from Salesforce or SugarCRM.
- A macro library to interface with Subversion.
Interconnectivity
Thanks to its know-how in integrations, Go2Group has developped ConnectALL , a platform to easily connect your teams, systems and processes: 
It enables reporting on the entire project lifecycle, not individual components. JIRA, Perforce, HP QC, MS Team Foundation Server et Seapine are supported out of the box.
100% JIRA
Lastly, because integration isn’t the be-all and end-all of paradigms, synapseRT leverages the flexibility and extensibility of JIRA, building a test management system without having to leave JIRA. Using synapseRT, developers and testers can now see the entire release process, without having to hop between two different systems. 
For more information, have a look at Go2Group’s Products page.
