Allow new customers from a certain email domain without creating a public service desk?

[Andrew Vaughan]

Hello all,

We are currently intending to use Atlassian Service Desk to power both an internal helpdesk for IT/Facilities/Operations/Etc, and one public for our company's customers.

We are trying to determine how we can ensure that any employee using our company's email domain can create an internal helpdesk request without needing to create a "customer" account.  Additionally, we have to make sure that the internal helpdesk does not appear in our customer portal.

Unfortunately, if we open up the internal helpdesk to be "public" - the internal request forms will show up on our customer service desk, which is something we absolutely can't have.  If we don't create a "public" service desk, the system rejects any emails from our connected email channel unless that person has created an account ahead of time.

The problem seems to be that Service Desk seems to smush all of the portals into one endpoint, even if you have two completely separate Service Desk projects (which seems ridiculous to me...).  How can we do one of the following (from most ideal to least):

1. Have separate portals for our internal helpdesk and customer service desk without worry that they will "intermingle", allowing us to allow anyone in the company to create an internal ticket without the need for a prior account

2. Restrict the portal from showing the internal helpdesk unless they are a company employee, but automatically create a customer account for them the first time they send an email from our employee email domain.

Thanks in advance!

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

First is important to understand that for anyone to open an issue in a JSM Project they must be or become a Customer. So all of your internal employees will ultimately have to be listed as a customer in your internal projects. Second regarding the portal and what customer see - A customer will only see the project where they are listed as customers. So you can have internal projects for your employees and external projects for your external customers and neither will see the other projects on the Help Center unless they are listed as a customer in the project.

in your case you want to have internal projects for your employees and separate external projects for your customers.

[Andrew Vaughan]

Thanks, Jack - definitely understand the concept of customers, but what we're trying to avoid is having to proactively create a customer account for every employee we have (instead, wanting to use the auto-creation capabilities of Service Desk so that our employees can have accounts created for them when they open their first ticket).

The problem I'm running into is that, to do so, it seems I have to list our internal helpdesk project as "public". We similarly have our public support portal project configured to be public, as we want our support portal to be accessible by anyone.  This means that our Help Center now shows our business customers our internal helpdesk, as Service Desk doesn't seem to be able to separate out portals for different projects.

The only goal we have is to not require our employees to all sign up for a customer account in order to be able to use our helpdesk@ email channel, while, of course, keeping all intake private to the company (certainly not exposing it to our customers).  Maybe this isn't possible with Service Desk combining all portals into one help center?

I'm curious if you have any ideas there, either on how we can allow our employees to have customer accounts created for them on their first email to our email channel (without having to make the intake public, so it doesn't show on our Help Center unless the customer is logged in), or how we can prevent our internal helpdesk from being shown to customers on our public support portal if they are both "public".  Thanks!

[Jack Brickey]

Got it. Yes I have run into this before. Basically here is what I would like to have…

JSM project 1 - open access by domain (my company). In this case anyone that sends an email to this project email channel will be added as a customer if they have the approved domain.

JSM project 2 - public access. In this case anyone on the Internet that can find the URL could see an open a ticket for this one project. When they open their first ticket they are added as a customer.

Unless something has changed I don’t think this is possible. However, it does remind me that I’ve been meaning to connect with me my Atlassian colleagues and see where we stand relative to this capability.

[Rob Peterson]

I've created rules based on the email domain so that as a user submits a request, checks to see if they are a customer in a particular organization, and if not, adds them into that organization.  The only thing we have to know ahead of time is the organization and their domain(s) that will be used when emailing in.

[Alexander CTO]

Hello Rob!

Could you please share the rules, or the procedure? We working with a large companies where staff fluctuates. This will be very handy to us.

Thank you!

[Rob Peterson]

@Alexander CTO sure... 

Create the Organization first that you are wanting to insert reporters into.  Then, create the rule in the Service Desk Automation; start with the adding as an "Issue Created" rule; next add a User Condition and then a Comparison and finally ends with adding the customer.  Note: each organization would require their own rule.  We do have another service desk project that there are two rules - one assigns to "Internal Organization" and the other assigns to "External Users" - we then associate groups to those users automatically which limits what can be done inside the project (like internal people can add time/worklog entries whereas external can't).

Overview:

User Condition:

Compare Condition:

Add user:

[Jack Brickey]

great stuff @Rob Peterson . Thanks for sharing.

[Alexander CTO]

Thanks @Rob Peterson  with your hints we'll make our B2B clients happy :) 

[Daniel Horníček]

Thanks @Rob Peterson , but I don't understand how automation work if first step is "issue created"(no issue is created from new email in mailbox)? I have problem that customer cant send email issue if he not in the "project customer". Can you explain it to me.... I must to configured many private project for nany customers. 

[Rob Peterson]

Hi @Daniel Horníček  - if you are using a general email address to capture tickets into a central project, you can set that email address in the project settings.  In Service Desk, this is in the "Email requests" section.  More information about that here.  Are you trying to do this not in Service Desk?