Introduction
When creating a new vacation request, all users can select an Approver (usually a team manager or team lead):
By default, the Teamployees plugin does NOT create any notifications about newly created vacations. All requests are displayed on the Approval List tab, where they can be “approved” or “declined” by the approver specified when creating the vacation request:
However, in the Event Notifications section of the settings, you can specify a project in which the Teamployees plugin will create special Jira issues when a vacation request requires approval.
Such an Jira issue will contain the name of the selected Approver as the Assignee, and the name of the User who created the vacation request will be indicated as the Reporter. Here is an example:
Changing the Jira issue status to "Event Approved" or "Event Declined" changes the vacation request status.
This way, the Teamployees plugin makes the vacation request approval process as native to Jira as possible. Assignee and Reporter will receive notifications about new issues, as well as changes in their status, in the usual way via email or in the Jira notification panel. In terms of functionality and capabilities, these are regular issue in a Jira project. You can even set up integration with Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Setting up Event Notifications
Here's how you can configure it so that vacation requests that require approval are created as Jira issues.
For the vacation request approval process, it is recommended to create a separate empty Jira project of the type Company-managed business. Please follow the guide below:
In the Projects menu in your Jira instance, click on the create new project button. Then, in the window that opens, in the Work management section, select the template called Blank project:
Specify the following fields:
Name: Give the project a name of your choice, for example "Vacation Requests" or simply "Vacations". In our case, we will name the project "Teamployees (Vacations)" for clarity.
Project type: Click Show more to open additional settings. And in the Project type drop-down list, select the Company-managed type.
Finish by clicking the Create project button:
Additionally, you can make sure that the new project was created with the required type Company-managed business:
Go to the plugin settings section by the following path: Apps → Manage apps, and then in the left menu column go to the Teamployees Configuration section in the Event Notifications tab.
Specify the following fields:
Project: Select the project in which Jira issues with vacation requests will be created. We recommend using an empty Jira project created specifically for this purpose. Alternatively, you can use an existing project, but additional setup will be required as explained below.
Description: If necessary, change the default text that will be displayed in the Jira issue.
Click the Confirm button to continue:
After a short check, you will see a yellow message. To implement the vacation approval process in the selected Jira project, you must manually approve the publication of the new workflow scheme.
Just follow the Publish Workflow Draft link and publish the changes to the workflow scheme:
Clicking on the link will open a new tab in your browser, then confirm the changes by clicking on the Publish button:
If you are using an blank "Company-managed business" Jira project as recommended, no migration is required, just click the Associate button to continue:
It will take some time for the new workflow to publish, after which you will see a message indicating a successful migration:
You can now close this browser tab.
Go back to the Teamployees Configuration section and refresh the browser page. If all the previous steps were performed correctly, you should see a green message indicating that the configuration is complete:
To make all requests for a day off mandatory approval, choose the "Approver is required" option in the general settings of the Teamployees plugin.
