How to manage licenses correctly

Question

After reading many articles and KBs we are still confused about the Service desk license for agents vs. non-agents (our employees that request help via service desk).

Does anyone have a good explanations and steps we need to take to allow employees to login to Jira service desk to submit tickets and agents to login to work on tickets.  Today everyone in the company is assigned license resulting in larger monthly bills.

Our goal is to only assign license to agents thus reducing monthly cost.

Thank you

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Ok, you've got four types of licence/user layers here:

* Agents: can use* the full functionality of Jira Service Management projects, transitions, queues, SLA reporting, working on service management issues etc
* Jira Core/Work Management and Software projects (but not the Software boards) 
* The customer portals and requests as though they were a customer

* Jira Software users* Jira  and Software projects
* The customer portals and requests as though they were a customer
* Can see JSM projects, but can only have a limited interaction with them (mostly aimed at an Agent saying "hey, we need some development help/work with this one")

* Jira Core/Jira Work Management users* As Jira Software users, but can't use the Software boards or other JSW functions

* Jira Customers* Can only use the portals and requests.  They have no access to the issues, even the issues that their requests are built on.

So, your employees are probably in three groups:

* Customers - people who have no reason to use Jira other than for raising requests, they're not doing project work, development, or anything else you track in Jira.
* General Jira users with Software and/or Work Management (who do not need to do service delivery work like the agents do).  They can use these accounts as customers too
* Service Desk Agents who will be answering the customer calls

So review your people's access into those groups, considering:

* Agents are expensive, but most places only need a few (one of my current clients has 12, compared with Jira user base of around 9,000 and tens of thousands of customers)
* Jira users need to be licenced for access
* Customers are free

Piotr Zadrożny _Eyzee_ · Answer

Hi @kamlesh.patel

Employees that require only access to the customer portal to create new requests do not require any license.

Agents who will work on customer requests and resolve them do require valid licenses.

You can read more about it here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-user-types-and-roles/

Best,

Piotr