What can you do with Assets?

Once you know what Assets is, the next question is usually what your team would actually use it for.

Assets supports use cases across any team: engineering, product, program management, marketing, sales, legal, finance, HR, facilities, and IT operations. A legal team tracks contracts and their renewal dates. A facilities team tracks locations and the vendors that service them. An IT operations team tracks equipment and who it's assigned to. The jobs below are the same in each case.

Track and organize objects

You can organize objects in schemas - think of a schema as a workspace for a related group of things - define what information each type of object captures, and connect related objects to one another.

Teams commonly start with the things their work depends on most:

• Services and the teams that own them

• Employees and the people responsible for a piece of work

• Vendors and supplier relationships

• Contracts, their owners, and their key dates

• Locations and facilities

• IT equipment and hardware

You decide what each type captures, so a contract can carry a renewal date and an owner while a location carries a site and a floor. For definitions of the terms used here, see the Assets glossary.

Connect related objects

Objects rarely sit on their own. You can connect them so that the relationships between them are visible: the vendor that supplies a service, the contract that covers it, the team that owns it, and the location it runs from.

Those connections are what let your team answer questions that span more than one list, such as which teams are affected if a vendor relationship ends.

Link objects to Jira work

You can link Assets objects to Jira work to add context to work items.

This means the person picking up the work can see what it relates to without leaving it to go and ask. For how to do this, see Attach Assets objects to Jira work items.

Find and use data

You can search across your Assets data, build saved filters, and use Assets Query Language (AQL) for advanced queries.

AQL is there when you need something more precise than a search, such as narrowing to a set of objects that share particular values. Saved filters let your team reuse the views it relies on rather than rebuilding them each time.

Control access

You can control who can view and edit Assets data using roles.

This lets you keep sensitive information, such as contracts or employee details, visible only to the people who need it, while keeping the rest available to the teams that use it day to day. To understand how roles work, see What are roles?.

Get started

When you're ready to set up your first objects, work through Get started with Assets.