YouTrack
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YouTrack Introduces Free Writing Assistance, Powered by JetBrains AI
Writing assistance powered by JetBrains AI is now included in YouTrack 2024.2. All cloud and server customers with active subscriptions can use it for free to automatically check grammar, spelling, and punctuation and add precision and flair to their writing.
We’ve also added improvements based on the most popular requests from teams using various parts of YouTrack on a daily basis. In YouTrack Helpdesk, you can now create online forms with conditional fields that allow for enhanced customization of your reporters’ tickets, while also allowing agents to clone tickets in order to work on them in other, non-helpdesk projects. Also, agents now know when other agents add comments. Additional improvements include streamlined setup for new projects, major performance and scalability boosts, and more.
Free AI-powered writing assistance for everyone
AI assistance in YouTrack now comes with even more features to enhance your teams’ efficiency. It can now help you with real-time proofreading of texts everywhere in YouTrack. The currently supported languages include English and German, with more to be added in the future.
You can rely on the AI to help describe your tasks, write articles, or participate in discussions. It will automatically check grammar, spelling, and punctuation as you write, and you can check the suggestions one by one or apply all corrections at once.
These proofreading features supplement the functionality of AI Assistant in YouTrack, which has been available since 2023 – generating at-a-glance summaries of content in tasks, articles, or support tickets, as well as making suggestions when composing replies.
To make the functionality available to your team members, your administrators should enable the AI-powered features on your YouTrack Cloud or Server, and then turn on the writing assistance feature. Both of the options rely on JetBrains AI credits, which are now replenished weekly for free. Later on, we’ll add the opportunity to purchase more JetBrains AI credits in case your team runs out.
Helpdesk improvements for support teams
Create online ticket collection forms with conditional fields
Online forms, which users fill out to file tickets in your helpdesk projects, have become more flexible. You can now use conditional fields to help you collect relevant information based on what reporters have provided in another field. For example, after the customer selects a request type, subsequent fields will present only the options that are relevant to this kind of request.
Project administrators in helpdesk projects can set the dependency between fields. One or several conditional fields can be shown based on a previously selected field. Then, you can add as many such fields as you need to the form, and they will be shown to reporters based on the settings you define. That way, you can ask for various data based on the product, type of request, and so on.
Know when other agents add comments
Sometimes, multiple people are involved in resolving the same support request. Now, support agents and your team members can see when other agents or team members are in the process of adding a comment to a ticket. This helps avoid duplicating efforts and lets you know who is working on an answer to the customer right now. A simple note showing your colleague is typing something will help agents to coordinate their work.
Clone tickets to non-helpdesk projects
This enhancement is also based on one of the most popular scenarios experienced by support teams using YouTrack. Sometimes, based on the information in your ticket, you want to continue working on it in one of your internal projects and convert the request into a feature or some other type of issue. Now, you can use the Copy to issue tracker command to easily create a copy of the ticket in another selected project. The newly created task will also automatically be linked as “relates to” the ticket in the helpdesk project, helping you track the source of the new issue.
Convenience in working with tasks and articles for everyone
View the history of text changes in tasks, articles, and comments
Based on your feedback, we’ve added the ability to review the edits applied to issue descriptions and comments to issues and articles (in addition to the previously available option to check on the history of changes for articles). This allows you to access a list of previous updates with information about who made each change and when. Highlights of the changed lines should help you navigate through texts easily. If the change was made in error or should be reverted, you can restore a previous version at any time. Use the settings or the activity stream to start working with the history of changes.
Convenience in working with attachments
For administration, legal, and other project teams, we’ve made it easier to deal with multiple document attachments. You can now choose how to view attachments – as file previews or as a list with details about each document. Attachments are also grouped into those added to the task description and files that were uploaded later in the comments. Finally, when you need to minimize distraction, you can just collapse the whole attachment section.
Improvements for dark theme lovers
We’ve significantly improved our dark mode for better visibility and convenience. We won’t try to describe the changes, but we hope they make a difference for many of you who prefer working in dark mode. Just check out the mode in YouTrack, as a picture is worth a thousand words.
Export articles as Markdown files
A new feature, also based on a very popular request, lets you export articles as Markdown files. This makes it easier for you to transfer your content from the YouTrack Knowledge Base to other platforms, applications, or systems without losing formatting and structure. Choose whether you want to export individual articles or all of their sub-articles, comments, and attachments.
Support for Mermaid diagrams for developers, technical writers, and project managers
Support for Mermaid syntax is a long-awaited feature for teams and project leaders who prefer a text-based, code-friendly approach to creating their visualizations. YouTrack now supports diagrams and charts created using Mermaid markup. You can add them to your tasks or articles and share them in comments – even inline comments in a Knowledge Base. Just embed the diagram as a code block with Mermaid syntax, and it will then be rendered automatically.
Easier creation of new projects for project administrators
We have updated the project wizard in YouTrack to help your project managers navigate the project creation process more easily. You can start with a project template and customize it to the team’s needs. Choose between the Default, Helpdesk, Scrum, and Kanban templates to kick off. The project wizard will lead you through the process of configuring each project and task template. In the next steps, you can invite your team members, enable time tracking, and select other settings.
The default project template would be a good place to start to configure everything based on your specific team’s scenario. In addition to that, for teams working in time-boxed iterations, for example, a Scrum project would provide preconfigured tasks with fields and two preconfigured Agile Boards with sprints – one for project managers and another for the development team.
If you want to experiment with various YouTrack configurations, you can also choose the Demo project template. It contains a preconfigured set of sample tasks, a collection of Agile Boards, reports, and a dashboard.
YouTrack has become faster for everyone
Both the cloud and server versions of YouTrack have undergone major performance and scalability improvements. Being able to do what you need to do quickly is always a priority and something that many teams mention as a key advantage of YouTrack over other trackers. This is why we’ve made YouTrack work significantly faster for the most frequently performed actions.
YouTrack is now able to handle more issues, articles, and files with fewer CPU cores and less RAM. The main pages, such as the issue pages, issue lists, and many more now load noticeably faster, with less traffic and lower server response times, especially for bigger YouTrack installations with thousands of users.
Other enhancements
YouTrack workflows now include more options related to articles, comments, and attachments. This release also includes upgrades to VCS and Build Server integrations, import configurations, and more.
Check out the Release Notes for the full technical details and a comprehensive list of bug fixes and improvements in this release. For details on configuring the latest features, see the documentation.
If you use YouTrack Cloud, you’ll automatically be upgraded to YouTrack 2024.2 in accordance with our Maintenance Calendar. If you have an active YouTrack Server subscription, you can download YouTrack 2024.2 today. If you don’t already have a license, you can use the free trial to test out the new version before you commit to buying! For more information about the licensing options available for YouTrack, please visit our Buy page.
We always appreciate your feedback. Please share it in the comments below, and don’t hesitate to contact our Support team if you have any questions. We’re always here to help!
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