Collaboration with customers or external users

Carsten Severin _KUMAVISION AG_

In almost every of our projects, we face the challenge of collaborating with customers. However, for data security reasons, we do not want to allow external users access to our instance. Nevertheless, we face the challenge of sharing data and work items across departments and working on them together with our customers.

We currently synchronize these instances with the Backbone Work Sync for Jira (Two Way Issue Sync) app from K15t, which works very well and basically meets our needs exactly.

How do you deal with such challenges? What are your experiences?

Calvin

Honestly part of our issues is the "business side" essentially the business both wants to "not share tickets" but also "do share tickets".

And you can't exactly have it both ways, I find its best to have a clear process otherwise it gets murky in a "I'm a manager and I think my project should be available to a customer BUT if a customer sees something they shouldn't now I'm angry because they have access to see the mean comment I made on their requirement" haha.

In any case for us we sort of have a few tiers:

1. Trusted customers - these have their own account and access to specific projects as part of their onboarding process.
   • These customers only have access via an email we provide them by our own domain. That way we can not only revert access to the project/site but the email itself.
2. Confluence Only view - These users only have access to the Confluence space, in this space only certain tickets, updates etc are provided and the space itself is available for the customer.
3. If its small pieces of work we also use Jira Service Management, we have a Service Request with a ticket on the portal here was can provide updates. This is more useful for smaller and simpler updates/changes.
4. This is a little annoying but we do have some reports that are sent to an Outlook email which is then forwarded to certain users via an Outlook rule. This is mostly a JQL query so they can review stories and see status updates etc in wider level.
   • We are however looking at connecting analytics to an outside source, this way we can provide reports, ticket info etc to users without requiring sql analytics knowledge. But this doesn't really provide that "collaboration" feel.