Are you a Jira administrator responsible for the security of your Jira instance? Do you need to guarantee that time sheets are protected accurately from the eyes of specific roles, groups, or users? Sounds like little fun and a lot of effort at first, but we have something for you.
Before we present you the solution, we want to point out the problems with data privacy compliant time tracking.
Clear answer: yes.
Of course, you should keep an eye on your employees’ work motivation. No one likes to be a protagonist in “Big Brother” and be constantly supervised.
Therefore, first, make sure that you will transparently communicate the benefits of time tracking with Jira. Communicate that important personal data like timesheets are completely secure. This knowledge is essential to your company culture. In addition, stricter privacy-compliant time tracking policies may be required by law in the near future. In Europe, new time tracking laws are already discussed. So, it’s time to rethink your current time tracking practices. There are already some sectors (insurance industry) or companies that internally emphasize data protection and are dependent on establishing absolutely secure data security in their time tracking.
Stock Jira offers configurations for work log visibility, but there are workarounds to view logged working time – even though permissions you set as an administrator should make it inaccessible to certain user groups.
If they trick your privacy permissions, the result in the Jira ticket looks like this:
As you can see, there is a lot to see.
A serious problem if you want to combine data protection and intelligent time tracking – or even have to, due to strict regulations.
But don’t worry, with Timesheeet Builder you’ll create the configurations for absolutely secure time tracking at lightning speed.
In our last article, we already showed you how to create and manage teams with Timesheet Builder.
Now we will show you how to guarantee secure timesheets.
1. Start in the Teams module of Timesheet Builder and then navigate to Create Team.
2. Following you will see this pop-up, where you can, of course, enter team names etc. and also set the working time visibility. Just choose between Public and Secured.
Public work logs are visible to anyone in your team who has the permission to view them. They are also wrapped in the “History” tab and “Activity” tab in the Issue view, as shown in the screenshot above.
Choose this option if you don’t want to protect your team’s data in any particular way.
A Secured Work Log, on the other hand, is only visible to users who belong to the team to which the work log is assigned to and have the permission to “view other work logs” or “manage work logs” (of other team members).
Thus, privacy is not granted by selecting the Secured option alone. To set the roles, please navigate to the Teams module and select Roles & Permissions from the Edit Team menu.
Select either (or both) of the following options to give the Team Member role permission to view and, if necessary, edit saved timesheets.
Once you have completed this step, your administrative work is already done!
The main difference with the built-in Jira solution is that we store work logs separately in our own and privacy-compliant database. This means they are not visible in the issue history or activity history of an issue. This feature is currently available for Data Center and will soon be available for Cloud.
Wondering what happens when you move a Public work log to a team with Secure Work Logs? Again, you don’t need to worry.
The app automatically deletes the previous work log stored in the Jira database and creates a new secured log with the same information in our database.
It all happens in the background while you focus on your work.
You can find more exciting details in our Secured Work Logs documentation.
Whenever you want to protect your team’s working hours from external Jira users’ insight, secure individuals’ times, or simply know the location of your data in a protected place, the answer is Timesheet Builder.
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