Vacations & Business Trips (HR Calendar)

Use case description: This calendar is designed to provide a clear overview of employee availability across the organization. HR can track scheduled vacations and business trips using dedicated issue types, while team leads and managers can check availability before scheduling important meetings or deliverables. It improves transparency and streamlines the time-off request and approval process.

Primary Actor: HR Manager or HR Assistant.

Calendar Shared With: Team leads, project managers, department heads, all staff.

To prepare the demonstration of this use case of our Calendar for Jira app, we created two separate issue types called Vacation and Business Trip and added workflows for both of them. We will share the setup steps and configuration. Feel free to use it, if you’d like!

Calendar creation

Let’s begin by creating our Vacations & Business Trips calendar. Follow the link to our application through the Jira Apps menu.

From there, navigate to the Calendars menu in the sidebar and click Create button.

We will name this calendar Vacations & Business Trips and use JQL to specify what it is based on.

Tip: if you aren’t very confident with JQL, we have a quick shortcut for generating JQL without having to write it manually.

You can then copy-paste into the calendar settings:

When configuring your calendar, you'll want to display only the most relevant work items for Vacations and Business Trips. There's no need to clutter your view with requests that are Cancelled or already Done. To achieve that, you can either list all the statuses you’re interested in, or exclude the Cancelled and Done works with the NOT IN operator:

To accurately place work items on your calendar grid, you'll need to specify which date fields the calendar should use. In this case, since we operate in days rather than hours, date field(s) is the most intuitive option. Simply choose Start date and End date as the fields defining the calendar.

Note: Only the Start date field is strictly required.

For the layout settings we decided to go with the year default view for more transparency regarding the employees' leaves. The rest of the choices are shown down below:

Once you’re satisfied with your selection, hit Create button in the bottom right corner of your calendar creation window.

Upon creation our calendar will look like this:

As you can see, without any distinction between the works it’s not so easy to read the calendar, even with our amazing issue icons. Thankfully, our Calendar for Jira app provides more than enough functionality to make the calendar navigation easier.

Let’s start off with adding some color!

Card colors for Vacations & Business Trips calendar

Navigate to the settings of our current calendar in the bottom of the sidebar:

In the settings, move to the Card colors tab.

Here you can use JQL to associate specific colors with the works' properties you wish to highlight. Out app provides a generous amount of color schemes—for example, for the vacations let’s choose the green color scheme.

We can use the different shades of green to differentiate between the works' statuses:

For the just made vacation requests with the status Open let’s choose the palest shade of green:

Similarly, for the vacation requests which are being reviewed we can choose the middle option—the more saturated one. Since our workflow identifies all of the review statuses as In progress, we can use a status category instead:

Lastly, for the vacations that had been Approved we can use the brightest shade of green in our palette:

For the Business Trip works we can choose pink shades:

After applying the settings our calendar will change its appearance:

To quickly preview the Card color settings (for example, if you are checking the calendar created by another person and wish to know what different colors mean) head over to the bottom of the sidebar and click the Legend button:

You can see the entire JQL associated with the specific color by hovering your mouse cursor over that color.

Now that our calendar is much easier to read, we can also utilize our Quick filters for accessing the information based on the custom fields we’ve created earlier.

Quick filters for Vacations & Business Trips calendar

Again, navigate to the calendar’s settings and then move to the Quick filters tab.

Let’s create quick filters for our departments and primary work locations.

JQL supports the use of earlier created custom fields and gives hints in their usage. It also brings up the possible options if your custom field is of a select type.

After adding a variety of quick filters and clicking Save tab settings, our Quick filters row located above the calendar grid will look like this:

Clicking on one of the options will prompt the calendar to display the issues that satisfy the selected criteria.

Note: When you choose more than one quick filter, an AND operator is applied to them. This means that for an issue to be displayed, it has to meet the conditions of all selected filters.

This works well if you pick filters that define different aspects of your issues. For example, if you choose filters for both location and department, the displayed issues will satisfy both conditions. It will also work if your setup has non-mutually exclusive parameters, where, instead of a single select choice you have multiple choice or checkboxes used.

Example: Choose DevOps and Int. Office quick filters. The calendar then will show vacations and planned business trips only for people who are in the DevOps department and are located in the International Office.

However, if you pick filters that define the same parameter in a way that creates a conflict, no issues will be displayed. This often happens because an issue cannot fulfill mutually exclusive conditions at the same time.

Example: Choose DevOps and QA quick filters. You've selected two different departments, and in our setup, an issue cannot belong to both at once. Therefore, no issues will be displayed.

Example: Similarly, create quick filters based on JQL—issuetype = Vacation AND issuetype = "Business Trip"—no issues will be shown, as an issue cannot be both types simultaneously.

Keep in mind that with custom fields, how well quick filters combine depends on your specific setup. You won't be able to combine issues based on properties from the same field that can't logically co-exist on a single work item.

Connecting external calendars

Effective planning often requires looking beyond your internal Jira data. Our Calendar for Jira app allows you to seamlessly integrate external calendars, providing a holistic view for future planning. By connecting an external calendar displaying upcoming industry events, you can cross-reference it with your Vacations & Business Trips calendar to later decide who’s going to attend said events.

To integrate a calendar from services like Outlook or Google Calendar, you'll need its link in the iCal format (the URL typically ends with .ics).

In this demonstration, we'll walk through adding a calendar from Google Calendar:

1. Open Google Calendar and navigate to the Settings menu (usually found in the top-right corner of your screen).

2. In the left-hand sidebar of the screen navigate to the settings of the calendar you wish to export in the Settings for my calendars section.
   

3. From there, head to Integrate calendar section.

In here you will find Public address in iCal format—the link you need to copy.

Note: The calendar must be public for this address to work in our Calendar for Jira App (and anywhere else). To make it public, head to Access permissions for events section of the calendar’s settings and allow public access.

Once you have your link, head back to our Calendar App for Jira.

4. Navigate to your calendar settings in our app and then head over to External calendars tab.

Similarly to Card colors and Quick filters, fill in the required fields. Choose the color for displaying this external calendar, then give your external calendar a name and paste the link you copied from the Google Calendar into the ICS link field. Click the add + button. Don’t forget to Save tab settings.

Your external calendar should appear in your sidebar in the Calendars section, below the External calendars sub-list.

Note: This external calendar is attached to the calendar Vacations & Business Trips. Switching to another Internal calendar will hide the external calendars added to this one.

Creating Non-Jira events for Vacations & Business trips calendar

The Non-Jira Event (NJE) feature is an invaluable tool for quick, visual communication, which could act like sticky notes on the calendar. While the Vacations & Business Calendar is primarily focused on employee time off and travel, NJEs allow the HR team to inject vital, non-vacation context directly onto the schedule. This includes key administrative tasks, like marking the deadline for finding a temporary replacement for a departing employee or noting the final date for approving all outstanding leave requests. By utilizing the NJE's bright, distinguishing colors, these essential HR workflow items instantly stand out from the standard time-off entries, ensuring crucial deadlines are never missed.

To get started, click on any date where you would like to place the event.

In the pop-up menu, select New Event.

Once you click New event, an Event creation window will appear:

Select the Start and End dates and time slots in their respective fields, pick a bright color for easy identification. Provide a Name for the event—it will be displayed on the event’s card on the calendar grid.

Choose the recurrence of the event—whether it happens once, weekly or even daily. Upon using the reoccurrence option, another field will appear—Ends on. Choose when the recurring event will happen for the last time.

Click + Add link to include any relevant URLs. Write a Description for further context in the description field.

Once you are happy with the details provided and all the required fields are populated, click Save. The event will then appear on your calendar grid:

The Non-Jira Event (NJE) feature is especially valuable for calendars viewed in Year Mode, as the integrated Reminder for Jira displays are not supported in this high-level view. This makes NJEs the only way to introduce high-priority, color-coded visual alerts directly onto the comprehensive year-at-a-glance schedule.

Sharing your calendar

Finally, once the configurations are complete, it is time to provide access to your calendar to your team.

To do so, locate the Share button at the top, between the Search and Instant Filters buttons:

Click it, and the sharing window will appear:

In this window, you can select the user groups you’d like to share your calendar with. Choose the group from the drop-down menu (or begin typing the group’s name if the option isn’t there, and it will appear), then, once it’s selected, click Add. The group will be then added to the list below, indicating they will gain viewing access upon saving. Checking a box next to the group’s name will give the users editing permissions - they will be able to customize all settings except for Main and Layout tabs of your calendar.

Once you are happy with sharing configuration, click Save. The sharing settings will then be immediately applied. The users of the selected group will be able to find your calendar in the Shared with me section of their calendar manager: