An agent is unable to add a request participant to a Jira ticket

Salla Aaltonen

Some agents are able to add users with agent access as request participants to Jira tickets, but they are unable to add users who only have customer access, even though the agents themselves have the same permissions.

This problem has started in September.

We have tried to change customer project settings → customer permissions who can customers share request with to search those either within their space or organisation, but this change didn´t fix the problem either.

We have tried to use AI`s suggestions to fix the problem, but with no success.

How to fix this problem?

Sami Shaik

@Salla Aaltonen , the pattern you describe (agents can add other licensed users as participants but not customer-only people) usually comes down to where the customer-only person stands in relation to that service space, not to the agents’ permissions. Two checks will tell you which case you are in.

Check 1: is the person a customer of this space? Open the space, Customers, and search for them. In Jira Service Management Cloud an agent can add as a participant anyone who is a customer of the space; a person who holds the Customer role on the site but has not been added to this particular space (or to an organization that is in it) will not resolve in the Request participants picker, while an agent, who is a licensed user, will. If they are missing from Customers, add them there (or add their organization to the space) and try the participant field again. Customer sharing settings, which you already changed, control what customers can do in the portal; they do not change what agents can see in the work view.

Check 2: if they are listed as customers and still cannot be added, the account record is stale. Atlassian’s KB Issues with adding users to the Customers section of a project describes exactly this: users who appear in Customers but are missing from pickers such as Reporter (the participants picker behaves the same way). The documented fix is a reset of the account’s access:

• For a portal-only account: on the Portal customers page, ... next to the user, Revoke access, then add them to the space again.
• For an Atlassian account with the Customer role: in Atlassian Administration, Users, suspend and then restore the person’s site access, then confirm they appear in pickers again.
• If they still do not appear, the KB says to raise it with Atlassian Support, and I would, with one example account and the space key.

Two questions that would narrow it further: are the people who fail all portal-only accounts, or Atlassian accounts with the Customer role? And does the agent fail from the Request participants field in the work view, from Share, or both? If it is portal-only accounts only, and it began in September, that points to Check 2.

One thing to rule out, since it bites in exactly this way: an agent whose account lost the Browse users and groups global permission can still see teammates in some pickers and not others. Jira settings, System, Global permissions: confirm the agents’ group is listed there. I have not reproduced your case, so I am giving you the order I would test in rather than a single cause.