Does JSM Read-Only profile require licence and we need to pay for each read-only profile

[Ashok Murugesan]

Does JSM Read-Only profile require licence, does it requires any cost and we need to pay for each read-only profile

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Ashok Murugesan 

What instructions did you follow to create the JSM read-only profile?

Based on what I've read about creating read only profiles it involves creating a user group, adding the users to it, and the restriction the group to have only the Browse Projects permission. In that case you still have to grant the user a license.

There could be some other way to create a read only profile, which is why I'm asking you to provide a link to the documentation you are referencing.

[Ashok Murugesan]

We are yet to create. We have few clients who dont raise incidents or any type of request in JSM anymore. However, to view the existing historic data in JSM, they are requesting us read-only access.

Currently we have created project to track all their incidents, bugs, enhancements and other request. Now, we would like to know, whether its possible to create read-only profile just to view those historic data without any cost.

If yes, need guidance on how to create read-only profile without cost. 

If cost involved in read-only access, then is the same as full licence user or it will be low?

[Trudy Claspill]

In what type of project do these items exist? Is it a Service project?

If so, then you can create JSM Customer accounts for the users and let them access the data through the Customer Portal. There is no cost for JSM Customer accounts.

You would need to add the Customers to an Organization in that JSM project (creating the Organization if necessary), and set the Organization field to that Organization for each item.

If you did not want Customers to be able to create additional items in the project then you would remove the "Service Space Customer - Portal Access" group from the Create Issue permission in the projects Permission Scheme (if this is a Company Managed type of Service project).

You would likely also want to remove the group from the Add Comments permission to prevent them from adding more comments. There are other setting you might want to modify for the project to prevent them from reopening issues or sharing the issues with more users.

I have not actually tested all this out. Based on what I know about the product this should work.

The customer portal gives them a very limited view of the issue, and of course is available only if the issues are in a Service project.

If you need to make more information available to them, or the data is not available in a Service project, then you would need to look and granting the users a License for the app, or consider a third party app that would enable you to share information with people who are not licensed users of your Jira instance.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello @Ashok Murugesan 

it depends a bit on what you mean by read-only.

If you mean a portal-only customer, then no, that does not require a paid JSM agent license. Atlassian’s current licensing docs say JSM is licensed by agents, while customers can access the portal for free.

If you mean someone who should access the project itself like an agent/team member, then yes, that normally does require a license. Atlassian’s docs describe agents as the licensed users who work on requests.

There is one extra case:
for incident stakeholders on Premium/Enterprise, Atlassian says they do not need an agent license, but on Free/Standard they do.

The key question is really:
portal/customer access or agent/project access?

[Ashok Murugesan]

We have few clients who dont raise incidents or any type of request in JSM anymore. However, to view the existing historic data in JSM, they are requesting us read-only access.

Currently we have created project to track all their incidents, bugs, enhancements and other request. Now, we would like to know, whether its possible to create read-only profile just to view those historic data without any cost.

If yes, need guidance on how to create read-only profile without cost. 

If cost involved in read-only access, then is the same as full licence user or it will be low?

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Ashok Murugesan 

for the use case you described, there´s not a free read-only Jira/JSM project user today.

If your clients need to open the project and view historic issues directly in Jira, that is still basically Jira-side access, and that normally means a licensed user, even if you restrict permissions to read-only only. A read-only permission setup changes what they can do, but not the licensing model.

So in practice:

portal-only customer access = free

direct project / issue browsing in Jira = usually licensed

there is not really a separate cheaper read-only JSM profile exposed here.

One extra thing worth keeping in mind: Atlassian is publicly evaluating guest access for Jira Cloud, somewhat similar to Confluence guests, but that is still only under discussion, not something you can rely on for this use case today.

https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/rfc-112-free-guest-access-in-jira-cloud/95498