The Azure DevOps integration is an Add-on part of our Integration Bundle, which costs $5 per user, per month. It's only available on Business and Enterprise editions.
Note: Trialists have free access to the Integration Bundle for the duration of their 30-day trial. No purchase necessary until the trial ends.
Simply choose the work items you're interested in, and we'll add them to a new project. Any progress that your developers make will automatically sync. Our integration is bi-directional, so you can also make adjustments to the effort or status of a task and those changes will be sent to the matching issue in real-time.
Getting Started
To fully set up any of our Azure DevOps integrations, you'll need to:
- Be on the Business or Enterprise edition (to see the Integrations menu)
- Have the Manage Integrations permission (admins have this by default)
- Access to a DevOps organizational account (not a personal account)
Activating DevOps in the Integration Marketplace
To get started, navigate to the Azure DevOps integration and click Activate.
Then choose which features to enable for your team:
- Copy Azure Boards
- Two-way Sync with Azure Boards (requires the Integrations Bundle Add-on)
Your team will now see Azure Boards options when creating a project:
The first time a team member chooses to Copy or Sync an Azure Board, they'll be asked to log in to their own Azure account. This allows ProjectManager to securely access their specific projects. This connection step only happens once.
One-time Azure Board Copy
Copying an Azure Board to ProjectManager is useful if you want to record where the work is at a specific point in time, copy an upcoming epic to see it on your roadmap, copy a completed epic to report on it, migrate between tools, and so on. Changes made to the Azure Board issues after the initial copy are not synced between the systems.
When creating a new project, choose to Copy an Azure Board. The next screen lets you choose to copy all issues in that project or only specific Epics:
Clicking "Copy This Board" creates a new project and adds the selected issues as tasks. The project that's created will be automatically named based on your selections, but you can change this later if needed. It can take several minutes for all your issues to come over; you'll see them gradually appearing if you're on the board, list, Gantt or sheet view.
All the usual project-level security rules apply to this new project.
Real-time Azure Board Sync
This integration imports an entire Azure Board to ProjectManager, then any changes you make in one system are automatically copied to the other. For example:
- As developers make progress in Azure, their status changes show in ProjectManager
- If you change a task priority in ProjectManager, developers see the change in Azure
- When new issues are created in Azure, matching tasks will appear in ProjectManager
When creating a new project, choose to Sync an Azure Board. The next screen lets you choose the board you'd like to work with:
Clicking "Sync This Board" creates a new project and copies over the issues as tasks. The project itself will be created instantly, but the issues may take time to be imported as tasks, depending on the project size.
Tasks added, removed or changed in this project will be reflected on the Azure Board almost instantly, and vice versa.
There's an icon beside the project name so that the rest of the team understands that the project has this special behavior. The project owner and manager can disable syncing at any time. Just click the icon shown above and then click the Stop Syncing button:
If you choose to stop syncing with Azure, the project itself and all its tasks will remain available in both Azure and ProjectManager; however, future changes won't synchronize between the systems. You cannot re-sync a project after stopping it, but you can start afresh by creating a new project and choosing the "Sync an Azure Board" option.
Which Work Item Fields are Synced
The following fields sync bi-directionally; changes to these values in either Azure Boards or in ProjectManager will be reflected in the other system:
- Name
- Description
- Priority
- Board Column
- Assignee
- Tags
The following fields sync one-way from DevOps to ProjectManager. Changing these values in ProjectManager won't affect your DevOps work items:
- Issue ID
- Issue Link
- Issue Type
- Iteration
- Parent
- Effort
- State
- DevOps to ProjectManager → A new user is created without a role (no cost)
- ProjectManager to DevOps → The issue will appear unassigned
DevOps doesn't have a concept of percent complete, so we map the work item state to the task progress. This ensures your dashboards and reports can still analyse progress even if the values are approximate. Status maps to progress as follows:
- To Do = 0% complete
- Doing = 50% complete
- Done = 100% complete
DevOps doesn't have a concept of start and end dates for work items; therefore, the work item creation date becomes the task start date with a one-day duration. This means the Gantt timeline represents the velocity of ticket creation over time. If you manually set task dates and durations in ProjectManager, this data will be retained.
Troubleshooting
If you get stuck, we're here to help:
- Firstly, you should check our integration troubleshooting page
- If you have any other questions, please contact us
