Is it possible to use Jira as a joint ticketing system between 2 different companies?

Jodi Jones_1cxzew

Use Case

- As an employee of company A who partners with company B, I want a way to be able to submit tickets to a Jira board we can both see, so that I can prioritize our requests and they can status them and ask questions and we can operate as a "team".  

Requirements

- Outside of any tickets in this particular area/project, Company A and Company B should not be able to see a single thing from the other organization.  

- Both companies already have licenses for their organization and we don't want to incur additional costs.  

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Jodi Jones 

Does Company B have subscription to Jira Service Management? The rest of my answer is based on Company B having such a subscription.

Based on your requirements:

1. I want a way to be able to submit tickets
2. to a Jira board we can both see,
3. so that I can prioritize our requests and
4. they can status them
5. and ask questions and
6. we can operate as a "team"

With Jira Service Management you could submit issues to a "project" hosted by Company B. They could provide you with a field to set a Priority value for your issues. That satisfies 1 and 3.

They could post comments on the issues to ask you questions, and you could respond to those comments in a Customer Portal or via email. That would satisfy 5.

As the owner of the instance and the project Company B would designate JSM Agents who would be able to change the status of the issues. That would satisfy 4.

You would be submitting those as a "customer". That would limit your access. You would see the issue only through a customer portal. You would not have full access to the Jira UI to view the issues. You would not have access to any board-style view of the issues.

As a "customer" you would not consume a license in Company B's instance. JSM enables a company to base licensing on the number of "service management agents" who have full access to the project, while supporting an unlimited number of "customers" that don't consume licenses.

 

If instead you want an environment that leverages Jira Software where both you and the other company have full access to a shared project and associated scrum or kanban boards, that requires the users to have Jira Software User licenses in the Jira instance you use, which could result in additional cost.

If one company hosts the project, they can implement security features available in Jira to prevent users from the other company from seeing any issue data other than what is in that project.

If neither company is comfortable with that, and if there are fewer than 10 people that need to access the project, you could set up a new Free subscription to Jira and share a project in that instance. The instance remains free only as long as you have fewer than 10 licensed users. And that doesn't take into consideration the cost of third party apps that you choose to use.

 

A third option is for you each to have your own copy of the data on your own instances, and use synchronization tools to share the data back and forth. Each of you would need to support addition of an identity that would have sufficient access to push/pull data from the other company's system. And the need for synchronization could result in lags where your data is temporarily out of synch.

 

I bet there are other options for addressing this need with which I am unfamiliar, since I have not had to satisfy this requirement myself. I look forward to seeing what other community members suggest.