Can I add customer-visible comment in Jira Service Desk without generating email notification?

[patfoley]

Hi There,

Q: Is it possible on Jira Service Desk to add a comment on a ticket which will be visible to the customer on the portal but which does NOT generate an email notification?

I work on an IT team, and in some cases the communication with our internal customers may happen in our email system outside of Jira. I would like to add the text of the email to a comment on a Jira ticket for future reference, and I am happy for that email text to be visible to the customer if they view the ticket on customer portal. However, I do NOT want to generate another notification email from Jira to the customer at the time of adding the comment as it would be a double-up on existing communication. 

The options I can see when adding a comment are:

   [Share with customer] Which will generate an email notification and be visible on customer portal

   [Comment internally] Which I understand means that this comment is visible to licensed agents only and not to the customer / reporter.

Q: Is it possible to add a comment which will be visible to the customer on portal but does not generate an email notification?

Note that for most tickets we DO want the comments to generate email to customer, but wish to know if there is a way to avoid it for selected comments.

I am not a system admin, but believe that we are running Jira on our own server and have the following versions 

Jira v8.8.0 and JIRA Service Desk Application v4.8.0

Many thanks,

Pat

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hi @patfoley ,

I've been thinking about your use case and I personally don't see a way of setting this up without creating a work arround.

By default JIRA will use the Customer Notifications that are set up in your project to send out those email notifications. The rule for those are unfortunatly not configurable.

I can currently only think of one option which can be handled in a couple of way

You disable that default customer notification, and you define a new rule in the automation (even legacy should work fine) where when a public comment is added but the state is something, or a custom field is some value only then do you send the email. 

It does depend on the agent first taking an action of setting a flag (e.g. do not send notification) and only then adding the comment (and then perhaps unchecking the flag)

So you'd pretty much have to define your rule yourself and define the email template again. + you are dependent on somebody first flagging the issue as "temporarly not sending notifications" before adding the comment.

You should be able to do this with the legacy automation on server or you can use an app like JIRA Email This Issue (JETI)

[patfoley]

Hi @Dirk Ronsmans 

Thank you very much for the suggested solution; I will run it past our Jira administrator and see if they are willing to try implementing it. 

I could see your solution working something like:

- I tick a custom flag "Do NOT send email for next comment" on the ticket

- I add the comment to the ticket and click [Share with Customer]

- The automation rule would detect that no notification email should be sent

- The automation rule clears the "Do NOT send email for next comment" flag so that future comments will generate email notifications for this ticket as normal.

This solution would mean that I need to tick the flag each time I want to add a non-notifying comment, but that would work fine.

Thanks & Regards,

Pat

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Indeed, thats the only drawback of this I feel. You need a second manual action to flag it first but I really can't think of anything else :)

[Cheney_ John A_ DPS]

I think this is a great miss-understanding of helpdesks that support only out side orgs or only internal or a mix of both. 
As a newer user to Jira, I expected the internal to be internal to the service techs ONLY. 
I would want to see a check box to make my techs the org and anyone not on that list is 'outside'

[Salome Khaindrava]

Hi, an answer to your second question: Q: Is it possible to add a comment which will be visible to the customer on portal but does not generate an email notification?

You can achieve this with a new add-on In-App Customer Portal Notifications for Jira

Add-on has an advanced configuration for each Jira project and is very convenient for portal customers.

Support is very helpful and is in search of new features, so your suggestions will be welcomed.