Roll portal fields out to fifty service desks

The problem

Fifty service desks, each with a slightly different idea of what customers should see, and one Jira administrator who becomes the bottleneck for every label change. Then the configuration built on staging has to be retyped on production.

Step by step

1. Build the default first. The fields most desks share, with neutral labels. Every project without its own configuration uses it.
2. Override where a desk is different. A project configuration replaces the default entirely for that project.
3. Apply a proven configuration to many projects on the Roll out tab, in one step, instead of repeating it fifty times.
4. Delegate. Project administrators maintain their own project under Project settings → Apps → Portal fields. The default, the project list and the languages stay with you.
5. Promote by export. Export the configuration on staging, import it on production. An import replaces the whole configuration on the target site.

What to watch out for

Two administrators saving at once cannot overwrite each other: the second save is refused and offered the current version. Tell your project admins that a refused save is the app protecting a colleague’s change, not an error.