This proposal applies to everyone who has a large amount of projects.
How to easy it is to find the project one is looking for? The current list is too large.

Although the new portal stuff could help a bit here, I am not so fond of it. A (new) user should not need to go through a learning curve of adapting portals before he can easily find that specific project.

Therefore I would like to make it much easier for users to find the project they are looking for. See below.

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Proposed solution:

Add an extra metadata field to a project describing its category. This is a free text field that can be entered or modified by an administrator at all times.

With this extra category field it is reasonably straight forward to show on the Jira homepage a dropdown box with all categories. This owuld allow the user to select one categroy from the dropdownbox to filter the total list of projects and show only the shortened list.

(One can make it more generic even by defining filters for projects like you do now for issues..)

Each Jira installation can completely define which and how many categories are used.

You could use breadcrumbs to show actually the path one has choosen to view this project. This will make navigation much easier.

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Example:

Our category field would for example have the following categories: products, components, support. Projects of the "products" category are interesting for sales & product managers. Projects of the "components" category are more interesting for developers. Projects of the "support" category are interesting for support managers.