Aha! Whiteboards | Add ADO work items to whiteboards

Whiteboards are perfect for planning and discussing your work as a team. Add Azure DevOps (ADO) work items — such as epics, features, bugs, and tasks — to your whiteboard for easy reference during PI planning, sprint retrospectives, prioritization sessions, and stakeholder meetings.

This article discusses functionality that is included in the Aha! Whiteboards Advanced plan. Please contact us if you would like a live demo or want to try using it in your account.

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Overview
Enable the integration
Add ADO work items to your whiteboard
Use cases

Unlike the bi-directional Aha! Roadmaps integration with ADO, the Aha! Whiteboards integration enables you to bring ADO work items onto your whiteboard to help with strategic planning. This does not create new Aha! records.

Overview

The Aha! Whiteboards integration with ADO is one-way. Use it to bring ADO work items onto your whiteboard for sprint and PI planning, feature prioritization, and more. Once added to your whiteboard, ADO work items remain synced upon refresh — keeping those record cards updated with the most recent data.

All individual whiteboard users with Edit access to your whiteboard can authenticate to ADO. Once you are logged in to ADO, you can copy and paste the URLs of individual ADO work items onto a whiteboard. You are free to paste a link to any ADO work item: user stories, features, bugs, tasks, or issues.

Just like Aha! records, ADO work item cards display the work item's ID, type, name, and state when added to your whiteboard. Other whiteboard users will be able to view them on your whiteboard, but they will need to authenticate to ADO to open them and view details in ADO or add additional work items.

Currently, you can add ADO work items to your whiteboard one at a time. You will be able to add ADO work items to a whiteboard in bulk shortly.

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Enable the integration

Whiteboards integrate with ADO on a user level rather than on an account level. You do not need to install or map anything — just copy and paste an ADO work item's URL onto your whiteboard. Then, click Connect to ADO and authenticate with the software in the new tab that opens.

You will then need to configure a setting in ADO to allow Aha! Whiteboards to access your ADO work items:

Navigate to Organization settings Policies.
Check the box next to Enable third-party application access via OAuth.

You must enable this setting to add ADO work items to your whiteboard.

Note: If you receive an error the first time you try to authenticate this integration, check whether you are logged in to your web browser with a different email address than the one you use for your ADO account. To resolve, just log in to your browser with your ADO account email address and try again.

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Add ADO work items to your whiteboard

Paste an ADO work item's URL directly onto your whiteboard. When you do, a new record card will appear displaying its issue type, ID, summary, and status. Click the work item to open it in ADO in a new browser tab. When you edit the record in ADO, its details will update on your whiteboard upon refresh.

Add the Sprint planning template to your whiteboard. Then, add ADO work items to facilitate your session.

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Use cases

Once you add these records to your whiteboard, you are in the perfect place to work through your strategic plans and collaborate with your team visually. Use purpose-built whiteboard templates to get started quickly, and take advantage of your whiteboard's tools to foster collaboration and alignment.

Prioritization: Identify which records to tackle next. Use the 2x2 prioritization matrix template to weigh each issue on value vs. effort.
Sprint planning: Visualize the body of work the team will tackle in your next sprint. The Sprint planning template is a great way to get started.
Retrospectives: Add records to your whiteboard to reference during retrospective discussions. The Sprint retrospective template can help you structure your meeting.
Stakeholder alignment: Hold a voting session on records you add to your whiteboard so you can align on what to do next. Participants can comment on records to ask questions or provide context.

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