Clarification on JSM license overlap with Jira Software/Confluence

Question

So my company uses all 3 product Jira Service Management, Jira Software, and Confluence. We seem to paying for licenses for all employees for all three products.

JSM Question

We have two groups where all employees are added to both. Only a handful owns/manages/uses the JSM projects and Confluence spaces, everyone else just submits request in the JSM portal or view Confluence spaces on the JSM knowledgebase.

Should we move all employees to the "customers" group, and only add the projects users/owners to the "users" group?

jira-servicemanagement-customers (no license paid)

jira-servicemanagement-users (paid license)

Joseph Chung Yin · Answer

@kuting -

For "all employees" (one who create issues via the portal), they are considered as customers.  There is no license cost associated with customers.  He/she will be able to access the issues via the portal UI env only.  If the comments (is public - example: your 5 employees who have the agent licenses for JSM and mark their comments "Shared with Customers" in the project UI, then your customers will see the update in the portal UI.

On the other hand, your agents have the ability to issue comments (private - Internal Only), then those comments will not be exposed in the portal UI with your customers.

When the issues go through the issue handling process, the customers will see updates (i.e. status update etc...) in the portal.  Any issue's fields updates are only visible for the agents because it will only be displayed in the project UI.

Hope this helps.

Best, Joseph

kuting · Answer

Thank you for these info @Joseph Chung Yin and @Alex Koxaras -Relational-

Clarification... So for example we have one JSM project where issues are submitted via a form in the Help Center Portal by the company employees. We have 5 employees who works directly in that project, managing and working on the tickets created from the form.

So in this case, the 5 employees will be added on the "user" group then (has product role access and paid license) while all employees should be added on the "customer" group (which has the customer role access with no license consumed).

My understanding with the customer access, even if they're able to submit request via the portal, they can still view the tickets that got created and add comments to it if needed, is that correct? or would they need "user" access to view ticket and add comments? Thank you!

Joseph Chung Yin · Answer

@kuting -

I agreed with @Alex Koxaras -Relational- statement.  For JSM, only agents required a paid license.  Therefore, only use jira-servicemanagement-users group for your users who need to interact with JSM projects via the project UI.

All other users should only be setup against  jira-servicemanagement-customers group for issue creation via the Portal.

NOTE - Jira Software/Confluence has their own licensing setup.  For example, anyone who needs access/interact with your Jira Software application project(s), then they need a license for the app.

Hope this also helps.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Technology Applications Team

Viasat Inc.