Channel Restrictions, Agent Roles, and Pricing for Jira Service Management

Question

We are currently using the free plan for Jira Service Management and are considering an upgrade. We have a few questions about channel management, agent roles, and pricing:

* Channel Restrictions:

* We are planning to create two additional distinct channels within JSM.
* Is it possible to restrict agents within one channel from viewing activities (tickets, conversations, etc.) originating from the other channel?
* If so, what are the mechanisms for enforcing these restrictions?

* Agent Roles for Customers:

* If we want to allow customers to become agents within JSM (e.g., for internal support), do they need to be granted administrator privileges within JSM?
* What are the recommended best practices for managing agent roles and permissions for customer users?

* Pricing for Additional Agents:

* We are interested in understanding the pricing model for adding additional agents to our JSM instance.
* How is the cost per agent calculated? We will have in total 14 agents for now, which includes 3 administrators.
* Are there any tiered pricing options or discounts available?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

In my opinion the cleaner solution is to have two separate JSM projects. You can then easily restrict the Agents' view of issues to only one of the projects by adding the Agents to the Service Desk Team role in just one of the two projects.

Add the users to the Service Desk Customer role in the other project.

With only the Service Desk Customer role in a given project, the user should be able to interact with the project only through the customer portal. With that limited access they should be able to see only the tickets that they create, and any other tickets in that project where they are named as a Request Participant.

In a project where the user is in the Service Desk Team role, they will be able to see all the tickets through the Jira user interface.

Without that separation by project you would have to configure Issue Security Schemes and set Issue Security Levels on every issue to block the Service Desk Team members from each group from having visibility into all the issues of the other team.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-issue-security-schemes/

partha.sarker · Answer

Dear Trudy,

Thank you for your prompt and informative response.

Regarding the "channels" in question, I'm referring to Help Centers within the same Jira Service Management project.

* Scenario: We have two departments (e.g., IT and HR) where each department acts as both a user and a customer of the other.
* Desired Outcome: We want to create two distinct Help Centers within the same project, each serving as a primary entry point for one department.
* Restriction: We want to restrict agents within one Help Center from viewing tickets submitted through the other Help Center.
I'm open to creating two separate JSM projects if that would be a more effective or manageable approach. What are your thoughts on this?

I appreciate your guidance and look forward to your further insights.

Sincerely,

Partha Sarker

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @partha.sarker

1. When you say you want distinct "channels" do you really mean request channels as they are defined here?

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-request-channels/

Or do you mean you want to have separate JSM projects?

You can certainly restrict agent access to different projects based on not assigning a given agent/user to the Service Team Member role in a given JSM project.

If you want to limit the visibility of issues within a JSM project to a subset of team members granted access to that project (through assignment to a role) you would need to look at Issue Security.

Issue Security for Company Managed JSM project:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-issue-security-schemes/

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/create-security-levels-for-issues/

Issue Security for Team Managed JSM project:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/restrict-access-to-an-issue-in-a-next-gen-project/

2. To be an Agent does not require also having Jira Administrator permissions.

An agent in a Service Desk project typically has access to view all data in the issues in the project, and all agents generally are able to perform the same actions in those issues. How would you anticipate your "customer" agents needing to have different access than your internal  agents?

And what problem would you actually be trying to solve by granting customers access as agents? If you explain the problem you are trying to solve with that, we can better address your question.

3. Pricing calculators for JSM Cloud can be found here:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/pricing

The more agents you license, the lower the cost per agent, but the cost per agent does not necessarily decrease for each single agent increase you have. For example the price per agent billing monthly is the same for 4-15 agents. It decreases slightly when you go to 16 agents.

Tiered pricing applies only to Annual billing and does afford a discount in that scenario. Change the above screen to show the annual billing option and it will also display information about user tiers for Agents.