Can I Use Jira Service Management For External Customers?

[Huskey, Michael (M.)]

I read a lot of the documentation and it says you can use Jira Service Management for External Customers, but after playing around with it I think that means external to my organization not to external as in random customers.

I know you can configure confluence pages to by viewed by anyone is it possible to have other parts of Jira Service Management visible to anyone?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

JSM can be used for internal or external customers. I am using for a wide variety of scenarios. 

• Internal: HR Staffing requests, IT, Facilities, etc
• External: Customer Service, Customer technical assistance center, service order requests and tracking

When you define Customer they are 'free users' and as such do not have direct access to the applications but do have access to monitor the issues they created or are participating in via a Portal. They also have access to any Knowledge Base articles that are shared with the project.

[Huskey, Michael (M.)]

@Jack Brickey Thanks for answering so quick. So for the portal I sent that to my wife who has no affiliation with our group and she gets a log-in page. Is there anyway to edit the customer portal to make them viewable by anyone? I am on the Standard Plan

[Jack Brickey]

What does "them" refer to in your above reply? Are you talking about making a JSM project publicly accessible or are you talking about sharing certain request w/ other customers. A really good place to start is with the documentation that describes Customer permissions - customer-permissions-for-your-service-project-and-jira-site . This link will provide you with a number of articles that should answer your questions. Basically, customers have access to one or more projects and they can belong to Organizations that control the sharing of reported issues and help silo your customers so that they cannot share w/ other customers. If no sharing is desired that is certainly attainable too.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

hey @Huskey, Michael (M.) ,

Just to chime in. You can open your project/instance open to be public too.

That means that anybody who has the url can pretty much create a request and their email address will be their identifying parameter.

They will not be required to sign up to the portal (they can if they want) but they will get a mandatory field being their email address. (if they enter an existing/real one that is up to them of course).

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-an-open-portal/

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-manage-access-to-your-jira-service-desk-cloud-967872675.html

[Huskey, Michael (M.)]

@Dirk Ronsmans Thanks for this! That answered my question

[Wally Hass]

I have an open ticket since July asking for help on this but really have not moved it anywhere.  Very simple request is can I give an external user to a project in Jira Service Management?  After two months of asking the same question with no real answers I figured it out and I can give them access but the problem is that they have access to all projects in the company.  

Can I give an external user access to a single project and not allow them to see everything in the company?

Currently my test user can see everything and only want them to get access to a single project. I am not looking to have external users submit tickets.  I just want them to see a projects list.  I know I could just create a Google doc but thought I would try to use this tool that we already have.

Thanks

[Jim Bren]

@Wally Hass , I have a very similar situation that I'm just getting started on. Curious if you found a solution to your scenario?

Thanks,

jim

[Wally Hass]

@Jim Bren I was able to get it working but by the time we did I really did not need it and just found another solution.   It probably took support 2 months to figure it out but it did work when completed.  Though at this point I would never be able to do it again since it was quite complicated and not sure I want to go down that rabbit hole again with support.  It was great once I saw it work.

[Jim Bren]

@Wally Hass Thanks for getting back to me. Your message confirms that there is a way for me to do what I'm looking for, just need to figure it out. I have support ticket open. 

If I'm able to work out a solution I'll post it here so other folks have it for reference.

[Aaron Geister _Trundl_]

Jira is based on permissions. Each service management project can be separated. You can allow your whole company to have access to one project in JSM or many. This is really depending on how you set this up. 

You can use groups to define who has access to which projects in JSM. 
Example I have three JSM projects. JSM-1, JSM-2, and JSM-3. 

Say JSM-1 and JSM-2 are internal projects and my whole company needs customer access to these. I can make a group and add all users to that group and then added them to project with "Service Desk Customer" Role we will call "company customers"
With the JSM-3 we can not any group to that and set the customer permission to admin invite only or we can open it to public with sign up option. 

Set up this way should only allow customers to see which projects they are added to and or invited to. 

You can also add IDP/IAM provision for internal customers and provision them from a source of truth in your domain.

I hope this helps. 

Here is a link to confluence document for best practice:
https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-and-manage-portal-access/

Good luck

[Irina_Bel_Stiltsoft_]

JSM is meant to be a customer support tool, which means tickets submitted on the portal are visible to the person that submitted them and your team. Also, a person can see tickets of other colleagues if they're included in Organizations.

If you need the functionality of a public forum where all the tickets are visible to everybody, you can check Customer Case for Jira app. It is a portal for your external clients where they can submit their issues or ideas. It can be public (visible to everybody), private (restricted for specific email addresses or domains, for example, for your internal needs), or you can choose the option to make it a support service just as JSM(private communication with a support assistant).