Getting Data In and Out of Jama Connect

As part of our ongoing series of Ask Jama webinars, covering customer questions and best practices, our most recent webinar was all about on getting data in and out of Jama Connect, enabling effective collaboration resulting in reduced rework and minimized risk.

Steve Rush, a Jama Connect expert and a consultant from our Professional Services team, covered options for getting data in and out of Jama Connect to create an ongoing exchange of requirements throughout the product development process.

This webinar was well received by our customers, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed out on this great content. Below, you’ll find a recording of the webinar and an abbreviated transcript.

Ask Jama: Getting Data In and Out of Jama Connect

The primary options you have are authoring items and requirements directly into Jama Connect and import options. Today we’re going to focus on importing Excel and Word documents into Jama Connect. Many customers are managing requirements, risks, or other information in documents, so it is very common that customers need to import this data into Jama’s item-based approach for managing requirements.

Authoring content directly into the tool is definitely the best method for adding new items, either requirements, risks, or any other items that you need in Jama Connect. By authoring requirements directly in the tool, you can take advantage of some of the collaboration functionality in Jama and bring team members into discussions earlier and often in a requirements gathering and creation process. Jama will maintain version history on a discrete item, so you can track all the different changes that may happen on a given item. If you are leveraging review center, feedback from reviews can be incorporated on the item and, again, you can track those changes here. Lastly, something to consider when you’re importing documents into Jama is that a document import may often times is simply a snapshot of an item at its current state. So, it’s missing an important context that may give you more information about the item and decisions that are made on that item.

But, of course, there are many good reasons why you may need to import items. Watch the full webinar to see a detailed demonstration of different import methods with Microsoft Word and Excel. You can also take a moment to go back and watch a few other our other webinars, like this one on release management options in Jama Connect, or this one on moving from a document-based design control and risk management in medical device development.