How to add users to only one Jira Software project - board?

Question

I have multiple projects and boards set up in Jira Software, and I need to add users to only one specific project (and its board) with limited access so they cannot view or interact with other projects or boards in our Jira instance.

Here's what I’m aiming to achieve:

* I want these users to have access only to one project and its board, without visibility or access to any other projects or boards within our Jira Software product. If I am inviting users through user administration, then I need to give them access to complete Jira product, and this is not what I want, I don't want them to see all boards, only one Kanban board=their project.

* When I try to add people to this project using the "Add people" option within the board, I notice that I have to select role, but for service desk options appear. I'm not clear on why Service Desk shows up in this context, as I'm working with a Software project, not a Service project.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Dijana Milojevic

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

To provide the best advice we need more information.

First, what types of projects exist in your system? There are two identifying aspects to each project:

- Team Managed or Company Managed

- Business or Software or Service Management

Limiting a user's access to only one project is a two step process:

1. Ensure they have appropriate Jira product access, and permission to the one project.

2. Ensure that the permissions on all other projects, and the individual's user group memberships, are set in such a way that they cannot access the other projects.

The steps to ensure the user has access to only one project depends on the types of projects you have available in your system because permission management is different between Team and Company Managed projects.

When a user is granted access to your Jira product they are added to a user group that is granted product access. There is a default user group for this, and there may be additional users groups for this that have been set up by the admins. When there are additional groups set up, the admins can choose to leave the user in the default group and/or add them to the other groups.

In Company Managed projects access to the project is managed through the associated Permission Scheme. Permissions can be granted to users groups, project roles, individual users, etc. Permission Schemes can be shared between multiple Company Managed projects.

Since the user belongs to at least one group that grants them product access, if that group was used in Permission Schemes to grant access to projects, then that user will have access to all the projects the group has access to.

Team Managed project access is handled differently. Each Team Managed project has an overall Access Level set; Open, Limited, or Private. When set to Open or Limited, all users that can access your Jira instance can at least view the information in those Team Managed projects. The project Access Level has to be Private, at a minimum, to block access. And then for such projects, each person that needs access to the project has to be granted a role individually for that project.

The third thing that factors into this is whether or not the project is a Service Management project. Such projects have a special Role for Customers which grants the user limited access to the project through a Customer Portal.

If you provide the information about all the Types of projects on your instance, and the Type of the project to which you want to grant the users access, we can provide more targeted advice on how to achieve your goal.

Marc -Devoteam- · Answer

Hi @Dijana Milojevic

Welcome to the community.

* To make this work and not have any mistakes, create permission schemes, based on groups or users.

As default in project permissions are based on global roles in the permission scheme, this will also prevent admin on a project to grant people permissions based on role.
* This is based on the default roles defined in Jira ootb.

See als documentation on permission schemes, manage-project-permissions