Allow external users to submit tickets via email without consuming an on-demand user licence

[Cameron Fowles]

We're using JIRA on-demand and have a 10 user licence.

We have three techs who need to be able to work on issues - comment, resolve, assign, etc. and require access to the JIRA interface. So, from what I see, only three user accounts are required.

However, we have dozens of external staff who need to submit issues via email. We need these external staff to receive a notification that their email has been recieved and logged, be able to receive comments via email and be able to reply via email. All pretty simple stuff.

How can we allow this without using up a huge amount of licences?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[StevenA · Accepted solution]

Hi Cameron,

Let's say you set helpdesk@ourdomain.com is the default reporter. Then when external user user@theirdomain send an email to him, a new ticket would be created with default reporter as helpdesk.

Notifications regarding updates, comments on the new ticket would be sent ONLY to helpdesk as he is the reporter and there is no way to notify user@theirdomain for OnDemand.

However, there is a workaround that you manually go to the new ticket in JIRA and click Share to user@theirdomain so that he can access and receive regular updates.

In addition, I have created a new feature request that automatically share the ticket to mail sender if he is not JIRA user so that he can receive notifications. You can have a look and vote for it at: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-35613 . In order to be implemented, it must meet certain levels according to Atlassian implementation of new features policy

Best Regards

Steven

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Enterprise Mail Handler for JIRA Cloud (JEMHC) is just about to go live, this is an external addon service for JIRACloud, its intent is to support all aspects of email integration with JIRACloud, including email only user support:

In this case, issues are created on behalf of email users using an 'addon user', emails are stored in custom fields, and notifications are driven by the content of those cusom fields, full round trip support is there.

For more, see https://thepluginpeople.atlassian.net/wiki/display/JEMHC

[Charles Wells]

Cameron, have you considered the new JIRA Service Desk 2.x option that allows for unlimited customers (ergo they don't count against your license). 

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/09/introducing-jira-service-desk-2-0/

Benefits include the ability to configure a customer portal for entering "requests" in customer friendly terms, as well as their ability to see their reported issues and communicate with the support staff via comments - all on the portal!

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/SERVICEDESK/Managing+customers

They can also receive relevant email notifications, and you can even allow ticket creation via an email channel. I recommend checking out all the options as it should meet your requirements nicely.

[Cameron Fowles]

Thanks Steven,

From my understanding that will set the reporter to be, say admin@ourcompany.com instead of customer@theircompany.com so we would have to manually update the email field in every ticket to be able to reply back and forth via email.

I want an unknown user (user@theirdomain) to be able to send an email to helpdesk@ourdomain.com which will create a ticket in JIRA that, when we add comments, etc. will send those comments back to the user@theirdomain.com without us having to manually edit the reporter email address.

I think that JEMH allows this functionality but will only work on self-hosted JIRA not OnDemand.

Regards,

Cam.

[Andy Brook [Plugin People]]

Just bringing this up to date, JEMH is not yet available to OnDemand customers yet, it does exist though, in a reduced form! - we are currently dogfooding it through our support mailbox driving our OnDemand generic SUPPORT project.

To your case, such users would be treated as email only users, no user accounts would be created (they would be stored in custom fields, just like JEMH Download does), and would receive round-trip notifications just as in the Download case. Of course, as non-interactive users they would not be able to do anything interactively, and with no public access would not even be able to see the issue.

ETA for public beta testing of JEMH OnDemand is around June/July, much polish to add before then, and licensing issues to address.

Watch https://thepluginpeople.atlassian.net/browse/JEMH-2370 for progress

[Crystelle Spinnler]

Hi Andy, is this on track? It's noted as 'in progress' as of today but with an expected public beta of July 2014. Thanks!

[Jenny Crowley]

Any update would be great. The OnDemand version would be a huge asset to our company.

[StevenA]

YES, by specifying default reporter on Mail Handler would allow external users submit ticket via email without cosuming additional OnDemand license.

You can follow this document to configure. When a new email received, if the email match with some exsiting users, then the reporter would be them. Otherwise, the default reporter would be the specified users.

Note that, you must uncheck Create User option during the settings and the default reporter must have Create Issue permission on the related project.

Best Regards

Steven