Bulk add customers to JSM with Guard

[Luke Verheyden]

I would liek to bulk add all customers of the company I work in to a new JSM space. I have set guard to use SSO. Am I right in thinking that if I have Use approved domains checked
and also have channel access set as open then evryone in the SSO group I set up will have access to the new JSM help center portal?

[Sami Shaik · Accepted solution]

@Luke Verheyden 

Good follow-up, and the short answer is that reporting is not the thing to worry about here.

JSM reporting counts requests, not customers. The four default reports (Workload, Satisfaction, Requests deflected, Requests resolved) are all request metrics, and custom reports are built as series over JQL filters, which query work items. So it is not that no report happens to count customers, it is that the report builder cannot produce one. Someone who has not been registered yet is not missing from your reports, they simply have no requests to report on. The moment they raise their first request, the customer record and the reporting data appear together. Nothing is lost in the gap, and no history is missed retroactively.

Where the customer list does matter is everything except reporting, and that is the part worth deciding on:

• Raising requests on behalf of someone. This one depends on your settings. On my site, where customer access is restricted, the on-behalf-of picker only offers people who already exist as customers, with no free-text email field. Where customer permissions allow anyone to send a request and account creation is open, agents can create a new customer account directly from that field, and there is an open request (JSDCLOUD-12596) asking Atlassian for a way to switch that off. Project settings → Customer Permissions will tell you which behaviour your site gives you. If you ever need the opposite, removing the Modify Reporter permission from a role in a company-managed permission scheme stops that role raising requests for other people.
• Organizations. If you plan to scope request visibility, share requests across a team, or filter by organization, that keys off organization membership, which only applies to customers who exist. For a group of 100, this is usually the real reason to pre-populate rather than wait for first contact.
• Anything driven by the customer list itself, such as bulk actions on customers or customer detail fields.

For 100 people, adding them manually is perfectly reasonable and probably faster than scripting it. If you would rather automate: the classic path is POST /rest/servicedeskapi/customer to create each customer and then add them to the service project, which needs Jira admin global permission. There is also a newer bulk endpoint in the Customer Service Management API handling up to 50 accounts per request, though it still requires the X-ExperimentalApi opt-in header (experimental methods), so it is worth treating as experimental rather than something to build permanent tooling on.

One thing that helps when planning this: approved domains, Guard SSO, and the customer list are three separate settings doing three different jobs. Approved domains govern who is allowed in, SSO governs how they authenticate, and the customer list records who has actually arrived. The first two do not populate the third, which is why the list can look empty even when access is configured correctly.

[Ajay _view26_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Luke Verheyden 

Just to clarify, "Open" channel access lets them raise requests on the portal, but it doesn't mean they're automatically registered as "customers" in JSM's internal customer list. They get added on first interaction (first time they visit the portal or raise a ticket). So technically they can access it, they just won't show up in your customer list until they actually do something.

If you need all of them to appear as customers right now (e.g., for organization mapping, SLA policies, or reporting), you have  JSM REST API — Use the JSM Cloud REST API to programmatically add customers. Useful if you have hundreds/thousands and want to script it.

[Luke Verheyden]

Thanks for the quick reply, I only have around 100 users that wil be using it so it may be easier to just add them manually. am I correct in thinking that if users are nto added as a customer then they wont be in any reporting?