Unlicenced and anonymous users in Jira Software DC

Question

Hello community!

Please help us with two questions about external access to a Jira Software DC instance.

1. Is it possible to add Users with restricted abilities to Jira Software Data Center, but without spending licenses on them?

Use-case: Invite participants from the customer's team to a designated area (project) with restricted permissions (read-only or read and add comments).

If I understand it correctly this is only possible in Jira Service Management. In Jira Software you can add restricted users, but they will be counted as licensed ones.

But I want to make sure my assumptions are correct.

Also, assuming there is no unlicensed users access, what are the best practices for such use-cases?

I think the easiest is to set up a Trello board and integrate it with the Jira project.

2. Is it possible to open specific project to an external anonymous access?

I.e. anyone with a link can open it and browse Issues in read-only mode.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Your understanding is correct.

There are five ways you can grant access to people here:

* Software and Core Licenced users: Can use the application (you can then do all sorts of controls with these users within the applications but the point here is that they)
* Service Desk licenced users, or Agents:  Can do most stuff with Service Desks (Core and Software users have limited access to Service Desk projects, whatever you do with their permissions)
* Service Desk Customers: Free, but can only use the Service Desk Portal and Requests stuff, no access to the issues behind it.  Called "unlicenced users" for the last few releases of Jira and Confluence
* Anonymous: Free, but you don't know who they are, so you never want to give them any form of write access, and often, no access at all.

There is no good way to give free users access to the projects or service desks in that way.  The whole point of that access is that these people *are* users and hence should be licenced.

The anonymous access does answer your second question though - yes, let anonymous have "browse project" and they'll be able to see the issues.  Just don't let them comment or otherwise write - you put that out on the internet and you will be uncontrollably spammed.