Customer Portal User Onboarding and Approval

[Ingo Wenke]

We are struggling a little bit with the customer sign up for external customers.

Jira Service Management provides following options for external customers:

• allow self-sign up, your project is public available 
• sign up only by agents, your project is available after sign up is completed by an agent

What we are looking for:

• the service project portal and it's knowledge base is only available to approved customers, e.g. manually added or checked by an service agent.
• all requests send via mail from everyone shall be processed by Jira Service Management, no mail shall be blocked.

How could it be solved within Jira Service Management.

Our current high level blueprint:

• setup a second service management Projekt, which listen to the mailbox.
• This project accepts all senders and won't send any notification to customers.
• automation compares new issues with the restricted JSM project
  if ticket exist in both project: customer is registered and copy can be ignored
  if ticket does not exist in restricted project, then process the ticket for approval

This is a very dirty workaround, we have not done a POC.

Any ideas to do it better?

[Dwight Holman]

Hi @Ingo Wenke - we are trying to do something very similar with JSM. After playing with the combination of options in JSM we're still not getting something we are happy with.

Did you find a way to implement an onboarding process you are happy with?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I think your blueprint is a good way to do this. 

I'm assuming the desire is to let your Agents work in the main project without having to worry about "is this an existing customer we should be working with" on every single request. 

A second project for requests from unknown users makes a lot of sense in that case.

Your two automation for de-duplication is a good idea for this, and I'd suggest another one to help your Agents triage the open queue - if an email comes from an existing customer, but the request is not a duplicate, then highlight it to the Agent as a priority (they may want to move it to restricted, or just deal with it and suggest the customer use the restricted portal in future)

[Dwight Holman]

The blueprint is a nice idea; this only seems possible if we transition JSM to use new email addresses (not the current ones we use).

Some more context:

1. We support distinct products (with different customers) and have separate support email addresses for each product. We intend to create a JSM project for each product -
2. During transition (when we launch JSM) ALL incoming emails will be from customers that are unknown to JSM.

We really want requests for access to go to the same email address as the JSM project. This seems a reasonable feature for JSM to offer (along with the other configuration options).

Or is there another way to configure JSM to route/process incoming email from a customer that has not yet been on-boarded? Discussion with Atlassian suggests this is not possible.

For now I have parked our JSM implementation project - there just doesn't seem to be a way to get the onboarding/transition process (mass onboarding of customers to JSM) AND the ongoing email & portal behavior we want.