external collaboration

Question

Looking for suggestions on how to manage the following:

Our organisation uses Jira software (company managed projects) - and one of these projects wants to start collaborating with an external company that sometimes works in part of their work process.

I would prefer not to give these external full access to our Jira, by just inviting them as Jira users.

What would be a simple and safe way to manage this?
I understand that it is possible to solve in different ways, such as creating group permissions/schemes, creating a separate Jira project, using external apps and probably even more.

These external users really only need to access tasks that are in specific work status, ie: they are assigned a task which has it's own status (and then they need to change the status when done).

We use Jira Software and Confluence (both as Premium products).

Benjamin_tmh9yg · Answer

Hi @Anders Hebert ,

All the employees should be in a group called something like Jira-users. So, it might be good to replace any logged in user with that group, to keep it not as open.

For any project you want to place external employees, create and use a group like external-users and applied that to permission scheme that you want to use for those specific projects.

Hope this helps.

Anders Hebert · Answer

Thank you @Benjamin - In Jira I looked at this and tried to set this up, but I become uncertain when I see the "Browse all projects" permission has "Any logged in user" as default. According to the documentation I found, I need to remove the "Any logged in user" permission, then add the new group I created.

But if I do that, then the consequence will (I assume) be that all users will not be able to browse all projects. Which would not be good, as our organisation work cross-functionally in multiple projects.

I would also prefer not to have to build a whole new default permission scheme for all employees, just to solve this problem (so much easier in Confluence as you mentioned!) Why is this so complicated??

Benjamin_tmh9yg · Answer

Hi @Anders Hebert

For Jira, you can edit the permission scheme to include a role or group for specific permissions for the external members. Then apply it to the project that your team wants to collaborate on. This way they only have access to specific projects that have that permission scheme applied and whomever you set as members of the group or role you set.

For Confluence, it fairly straight forward, you just give them single space guest access.

Hope this helps