Strategies to create new Gaia templates
It is quite easy to create and manage templates in Gaia for JIRA. Managing their content is the difficult part. This should be seen as one brick at a time. Templates should be managed individually: think of them as golden models for your projects and activities.
Besides, keep in mind that templates within your company shall be evolutive. A living thing, something that changes thoughout projects. It is unliky that the first shot you give will be the final one. In a middle of a project, you will notice that there is too much of this, not enough of that, new documents are now required, etc. My advice would be to create a very simple template in the first place. Then, start your project. If something is missing from your project documentation, add it to the project, and add it to the template too. Even though the template is not complete today, it will become more complete after a while.
Creating a template
Confluence
First, you should focus on the Confluence side: create a new space from scratch: this will be the documentation layers and blueprints to fill in. Order or classify them as you would like to find them for maximizing productivity. This can be a single Confluence page, or several sub levels. You can see this as if it was files stored in multiple subdirectories. As an example below we show the first level and home page of a template used for managing employees.
Now remember, this section is the golden model. It should be kept generic, with no mention of any specific employee, so that it can be updated, modified and used for everybody. When you are satisfied with your model, save the template, and import it into the Gaia Configuration. Gaia Templates are compatible with Confluence blueprints. Therefore, Gaia templates can be a mix of blueprint pages and a Confluence space already pages of information.
JIRA
Your Gaia template may also contain JIRA tasks. HR may have a recurrent list of activities to do each time a new employee comes in. For this, you need to create another golden model: a list of JIRA issues which are going to be automatically added to JIRA projects. This list can be modified, updated, and changed from one project to another, but as to remain generic. The figure below lists some tasks that can be added to a Gaia template.
Save this and add it to a Gaia template, and you have a Gaia template ready to use everytime a new employee is hired!
Automatically adding JIRA Tasks into Confluence
One thing interesting with Gaia is that you may add JIRA tasks into Confluence pages at project creation by the mean of textual tags. This can be really helpful to prefill typical information that would need to be entered manually in Confluence. For this, the first thing to do is to select a JIRA issue from your JIRA template, and add a tag in the comment section, as shown below (for instance, ##ID:HR2##).
Then, edit any Confluence page of your template, and add a reference to this tag, as shown below:
Remember to save and update your Gaia Template Configuration every time you change something.
When a new project is created, these tags are going to be replaced with issues from JIRA. The final result would be the following:
With these hints, you are betterly tooled to create great templates that save your precious time. Should you have more questions regarding how to create templates, please contact our support section.
