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Looking for suggestions...

Nick Coppola

I have a small consulting firm with only a few internal users on a free account. I'm considering moving to the Standard @ 7.50/month/user. I don't mind the expense if I am able to manage our work well, which seems to be the case.

That said, because I have clients, I would like for them to be able to view and comment on tickets. I presume that means at least one additional user per client. Is that correct? If so, this can become quite an expensive solution.

I'm looking for suggestions for how to best approach this. Thank you.

- Nick

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Trudy P Claspill

How much information do your clients need to be able to see in your issues?

You might consider if the Jira Service Management product would be sufficient to help you communicate with your clients. With that product, Service Team Members (your people who work on the issues) require a license, but you can also grant access to "customers" to have very limited access to the issues and they don't need a license.

The design of Service Management projects is like a help desk system, so you customers would be able to see only the issues that they individually create, or that are Shared with them, or that are created by a member of their Organization. Customers can't see all fields in the issues, and can't see Agile Boards, Jira Dashboards, or other such reports.

Another possibility is to create a shared account for your clients to use. While this is technically feasible, it is not advisable, as you lose traceability to the specific person who makes a change while using that account.

I think there might be third party apps that could help you share information with your clients without giving each one a license. I seem to remember such being mentioned in other posts, but I don't recall the specifics. If you search for "jira cloud share issues with unlicensed users" you might find links to more suggestions.

Dave Mathijs

Hi @Nick Coppola

With Jira Software (because you used that tag), every user is a licensed user.

With Jira Service Management, you can create a service project where your clients are customers and access the portal without paying for a license.

Nick Coppola

Thank you.

Nick Coppola

Thank you. So, I'm wondering, do the two products work together?

This is more project management and customers may bring requirements, etc.. but they won't create their own tickets generally. We will triage first, make sure we understand what's being requested, that it's not already part of an existing project, and then we will create the issue.

I just would like for the clients to be able to see the issues and comment. I suppose the issue, description, status (in progress, testing, etc..), and comments would be ideal.

Currently, we can export the issues but then we need to wait for the client to respond and then need to integrate back into the system.

So, I don't want to lose what we have, but want to be able to better facilitate client input and awareness in real time, if possible.

Trudy P Claspill

By "the two products" do you mean Jira Software and Jira Service Management? They can coexist in a single Jira instance/site, but you would have two separate projects - one that allows limited visibility to your customers, and one that your customers cannot view.

The customers would be able to see the summary, description, and status of Service Management issues, and the client-visible comments on the issues. Service Team Members can create comments and choose whether or not those comments are visible to customers.

You could create a link between the Service Mgmt issue and the Software issue.

You could use Automation for Jira if you wanted to synchronize data between the two linked issues.

Do note that your clients would not be able to see ALL the issues in the Service Mgmt project unless you did extra configuration to support that. If it is necessary for all clients to see all issues in the Service Mgmt project that will take additional configuration but I think it is possible.

This would result in you paying for licenses per user for two Jira products, as the licensing for Jira Service Management Team Members is separate from the Jira Software Users licensing, so your cost still increases.

Nick Coppola

Yes, I mean both Jira Software and Jira Service Management. If by two separate projects we are now talking about tracking issues in two places, I hardly see that as an attractive solution.

I think I would need to explore the creation of a link between the two, as well as the use of automation to synchronize data.

Customers, ideally, should not see anything but their own project, the issues within that are exposed to them and the comments that are enabled for public consumption.

Rob_Huntley_Tempo

@Nick Coppola

If you have JSM and Jira Software, you can keep your customers, and your service desk informed of issues, development, bug fixes etc.

You Service Desk staff need specific JSM licenses to work in a Service Desk project and manage the issue. However, your developers can work on the specific issue as contributors to the issue and their comments are seen by the customer (note: customers will only see their own issues in the Service Desk Portal).

However, if a customer feature request or bug come through the Service Desk portal or you want to inform the customer via the portal, you can link a task, or story, or epic, with a service desk issue. That way, the customer can see the status of the linked issue as it moves toward hotfix or release.

This kind of setup is pretty typical in environments where service desk are your customer facing team supporting software release.

There are a lot of articles and questions here in the community around setting up your workflows and notifications to support an integrated environment but it does work with Jira Software and Service Desk very well.

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