I'm confused with the permissions and user roles in jira service management

Question

Hi there,

can someone please enlighten me a bit on the permissions of jira service management? We're using it internally as an IT support portal, so every customer needs to be invited. I'm confused about the following:

On the page "Project Settings -> People" I can add people and select the role "Service Desk Customers":

Second, outside of the settings on the page "Directory -> Customers" I can also add customers with this dialog:

And third, if I'm in the Group Administration on admin.atlassian.com I see a default group "jira-servicemanagement-customers-foobar".

I would expect customers to be visible in all of those three places as for my understanding it's the same user pool for customers, but they are each having different sets of users. But if I add users for example in the second screen above, I cannot see them in the "project settings -> people" list.

And I if add existing users to the group "jira-servicemanagement-customers-foobar", they don't have permission to see the portal unless I add them in step 2.

So, what's the difference here between those 3 lists?

In addition I also have to add people manually to the group "confluence-users-foobar" to allow them viewing knowledge base articles.

Marc -Devoteam- · Answer

Hi @Simon Sattes

Then in the project access setting, you need to add the group "jira-servicemanagement-customers-foobar" and grant this group the role "Servicedesk Customer"

Helene Dryden · Answer

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/differences-between-people-and-access-and-customers-page-in-jsm-cloud-1319567856.html

Simon Sattes · Answer

Hi Marc, thanks for your reply - so the difference between the first option and the second is now more clear to me.

But I still don't get the difference between adding them manually to the group "jira-servicemanagement-customers-foobar" and adding them as a customer in option 2. Like I said, just adding them to the group doesn't work for me in that case - they are not able to see the portal until I add them as a customer - or I was doing something wrong.

But maybe it's also slightly confusing to me as some users are already registered users in my atlassian instance and some need to be invited by email.