Want JIRA Service Desk new user default to Customer Portal

Jacki Keys1

We have a nonprofit license for Atlassian products. As an administrator, I've set up JIRA, Confluence and JIRA Service Desk. We currently have all our support going to one person's email (we are small). What we want is to redirect the people who email for support to JIRA Service Desk. They are all external to our company. I'd like this to be as seamless for the end user as possible as well as keep administration overhead to a minimum.

1. Want to direct the user to a link to our Service Desk Customer Portal. If they do not have an account (as none of them will initially), they should be directed to a link to create their JIRA account instead (instead of being prompted to contact a JIRA administrator for this.
2. Once they create their account and log in for the first time, I want them to be restricted to only see the Customer Portal by default.
3. As admins, we can manually grant access as needed later, but no new account should have permission to view anything besides the Customer Portal by default.

Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]

Many of our clients request something similar to what you're asking for in the first part of item #1 and item #2. Jira/Jira Service Desk don't natively have any way of limiting the access to the traditional Jira interface based on user. We came up with a tricky way of accomplishing it, though. You'll see that there is a specific URL that is used when you open an issue in Service Desk. We set up an apache proxy server and use mod_rewrite rule to redirect Service Desk users to the Jira Service Desk url while users expecting the traditional Jira interface connect to that interface. I'd have to check the behavior when you allow users to create accounts, but I believe that will send them to the traditional Jira interface once they have created their account. They would need to return to Service Desk in order to get back to being locked into that UI. The permissions are pretty easy to do. You simply create a permission scheme that grants the permissions you need on the Service Desk project, and add the Service Desk only users to the permissions that they need and don't add them to any other projects. That will make all other projects invisible to them.