How to set organization on a issue without sharing the issue with the organization

Ivan Bilobrk

Hi Community,

I’m facing a challenge with Jira Service Management regarding how organizations are handled. We need to assign an organization to each issue for analytics purposes and easier searching. However, we also want to respect the customer's choice not to share their issue with the rest of their organization.

Here’s the problem:

• If a customer doesn’t want to share the issue with their organization, they select "No one" in the "Share with" field when creating the issue via the request form on the customer portal.
• However, as I have concluded so far, if an agent later adds the organization (for internal tracking), the issue is automatically shared with the entire organization, which is not what the customer intended.

Our requirement is to keep the organization linked to the issue for internal purposes without forcing the issue to be shared with the entire organization if the customer opts for privacy.

Is there a way to achieve this without using a custom field for organizations? For example, can we assign the organization but restrict visibility using security levels or another approach?

Any help or best practices would be greatly appreciated!

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Ivan Bilobrk,

It seems your question is still out in the open, looking at your last post of Sept, 25th:

I find it surprising that there doesn't seem to be a clean way to resolve this. Has anyone faced similar challenges or implemented a workaround that addresses both organization visibility and customer privacy?

Any insights or best practices would be greatly appreciated!

I noticed you mentioned that you stated the following earlier as well:

We would like to avoid using custom fields if possible.

However, looking at your use case, I am afraid the answer to your challenge is situated right there. The Organisations concept is designed explicitly to share tickets with customers belonging to the same company / team / group. If you want to do reporting on it as well, it is obviously quite practical that you can do this using the same field / concept.

The problem arises when your reporting requirements suddenly enforce the need to set the customer on each ticket, while you don't want that to make tickets shared with other members of the same organisation - while you still want to allow people to share tickets with their organisation (which makes perfect sense from a backup scenario).

If you want to keep all these options open, the obvious option is to not use the organisations field for reporting (as it makes the ticket visible by design), but set e.g. a customer field alongside this for reporting purposes.

We quite commonly use assets in the premium plan for scenarios like this, which offers a lot of additional benefits, as you can store a lot of additional information about your customer there, such as SLA agreements, products they own, contacts they have, etc.

Hope this helps!