Customer permissions - possibility to request access to portal

Question

Hi,

I'm looking at setting up an external Service desk for our customers, with a Confluence KB tied to it.

Since I want this to be exclusive to our customers, I assume I must set the Global Customer Permissions to not allow customers to create accounts themselves.

I want them to either access the portal or contact us by sending an email to support@xx.atlassian.net

My problem is how to manage this. How do I easily:

1. Create the customers that I already know should have access?
The solutions I have seen with Customers and Organizations are really clunky. Most of our customers are in Salesforce. Any way of transferring those into a Project?

2. Manage any new customers?
Let's say a new support technician joins one of our customers. If he sends an email to support@xx.atlassian.net that email never reaches us if he's not already on our list (at least, that's what happened when I tried myself). I would like that email to reach us so we can set up a queue or similar for incoming tickets from unknown sources. Or perhaps that Atlassian could auto-respond saying "Looks like you're not a registered customer. Click here (link) to request access".  Better yet if we could add a domain so that any email from a trusted domain, e.g. @brianstechsupport.com, should be set up as a new user.
Same goes with the portal. If I do not allow customers to create accounts themselves, they can reach my login page, but they cannot request access in any way. I would like to have a "Not registered with us? Click here (link) to request access"

I hope someone has had similar issues. Hoping there's a solution I haven't thought of. Any help is appreciated.

Angélica Luz · Answer

1. Yes, everyone will receive an email, but you can disable the invitation email on Project settings > Customer notifications > Disable the notification for "Customer invited".
You will have to create the organizations and add them manually to each organization.
I tried to create an automation using the own automation in the project and also an add-on but none add a customer to an organization.

2. There is no workaround that could get the email logs to send a notification to admins if the customer does not have an account.

Stefan Jonsson_c31t69 · Answer

@Angélica Luz (or anyone else that might know)

Thank you for your answers. My comments below:

1. Would that mean every customer would get an invitation email? Any way of not sending an email? And how do I easily organize our customers into Organizations? Do I manually have to add Organizations and then add each user to that Organization? I saw some options using automation add-ons that could tie email domains to an existing Organization. To mee that seems like basic functionality that should be part of the product itself and not require an add-on.

2. As suspected, a lot of what I would consider basic functionality is missing. I've voted for the ideas, but it seems impossible to know if these ideas ever will be introduced. So instead of waiting, I would need to find workarounds. 
Any idea if an automation add-on (like Automation for Jira) could find those server log entries and create a notification/issue or something similar, so we could be made aware that someone has sent an email to us asking for support. Then we can act on that if we believe the person emailing us should have access to our Service Desk.

Thank you.

Angélica Luz · Answer

Hi Stefan,

If you need to have a restrict project, the correct setting is the one you mentioned: Can customers create their own accounts? No, only my team can create accounts.

1. Create the customers that I already know should have access?
The best option to transfer the salesforce customers is by copying all their emails to a list and then paste on "Add customers", then you will be able to add everyone.

2. Manage any new customers?
When a customer sends an email but they don't have an account, it will fail to create a ticket and show the error on the logs "Signup is not currently available".
Currently, there is no notification for those failures, we have a feature request suggesting this:
- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-2517
Regarding the request access to the portal, this feature is not available as well and also it's not possible to add a message on the login page:
- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-5508
- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-2135

Please, click on vote and watch to receive updates about the feature requests.

Regards,
Angélica