What is the difference between a participant and a watcher on a JIRA ticket?
A participant is someone who has contributed, or been named by an agent.
A watcher is someone tagged into an issue. They don't have to have contributed, they can watch it themselves and anyone with "manage watchers" can add people.
Hi Nic,
Thanks for the answer. Can you help me fill in more details regarding the type of account each can/should have?
It seems to me that to be a Watcher, you must have Browse Projects permission. However, to be a Request Participant, you don't need that permission, you just need to be in the Service Desk customer list.
Thus, it is possible to add a customer as a Request Participant to a Service Desk issue successfully, but that same customer could fail to be added as a Watcher.
Do I have that straight? We've recently spawn more Service Desks and have run into this recently.
A Watcher is someone that will be given permissions for the Jira project. This generally isn't a customer since they wouldn't have access to your Jira system but only the Service Desk portal.
A Requested Participant is someone being given permissions for the Jira Service Desk portal. A customer can be added as a Requested Participant by using the "Share" function in the portal. There are restrictions on if/who customers can share with based upon the settings you chose in the Jira Service Desk project. Their access to view/participate would be through the portal only.
Hopefully this makes sense.
I have a follow-up question to this, if I may.
What are the differences in triggered notifications between being a Participant and being a Watcher?
Nothing. The emails are the same for all recipients.
Ok. Thanks, Nic.
So, if I understand this correctly, if I want to add someone on my service desk team to a ticket, I should make her/him a "watcher". Doing this seems to be something like adding the user as a BCC to the ticket correspondence; it delivers her/him the notifications, but will not display this ticket in the "watcher's" Service Desk "My Requests" area.
If this is correct, I like this distinction. Why?
Distinguishing participants from watchers is an approach that assists at least two ways:
Visibility Distinctions
Am I understanding, or have I missed some other important distinction/benefit/consideration?
I just recently came across this question while looking for an answer for something I am trying to figure out,
We have multiple stakeholders/product owners who owns individual products. We provide support to their clients on their behalf. How do we provide view-only access to the stakeholders/product owners to the tickets raised by customers for their product? They are not contributing just watching and may need to run some reports later i.e. how many customers we served in a month for product A.?
Watchers and participants don't have anything to do with this. You just need to make sure the project's permission scheme grants those people "browse project" (and ideally nothing else)
Thanks Nic. Does it mean, I will need to buy a team agent license for each one of them for view-only access?
Yes, they need a licence to use Jira
One issue I want to add here:
When you add an agent to the participant's list, the agent will only receive notifications as a customer receives. Even though you have added agent as water list as well.
As per the Atlassian, this functionality is as developed.
Like if you agree and acknowledge the same.
But if i have Jira users that i add as partisipants, and i comment on a issue, they wont get an email notification as they are not watching the issue??
Is there a way for me to change something so that Jira users get warnings on comments even if they are not Watching a issue, but only request partisipant?
You can't add participants - the field is calculated from the list of commenters, the reporter and assignee. But you can use that field in the notification scheme to mail them all.
Hi Erik,
Customer notifications for Jira Service Desk are separate from the standard Jira notifications. JSD customer nofications are found in the "Customer notifications" tab, distinct from the Notifications tab that comes with Jira Core. Check in both places to see who is configured to receive notifications in a JSD project.
It is possible if you add someone as a request participant (e.g. by Sharing it with them, or via the API), that they may not initially receive notifications you were expecting based upon the above mentioned settings.
Yes and this behavior is very annoying. Especially because our users often put agents in CC of their emails to Jira.
We used scriptrunner to remove any agent from the participants list upon creation/ commenting of issues.
You know they get added back when the issue is re-indexed?
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