How to restrict public comments to certain users

[Johan]

Hi guys, hope you are all well? 

So here is my scenario. 

"Customer A" logs the ticket to our helpdesk. "Agent A" picks up the ticket and escalates it to "Third-Party A" via "send this email" plugin. This Third-Party agent then replies to say that the issue has been resolved. 

I don't wan't the comment coming in from "Third-Party A" to be visible to "Customer A" but rather that comment to be internal. Is there any way that I can restrict this comment from being external? Or even make all comments added via email to be internal rather than external? 

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Johannes,

I'm great! What about you? :)

Per your description, I understand that you are looking for a way to prevent the comments provided by some users to appear for the customers. Is it correct?

Also, I see that you have tagged this question as JIRA Core and JIRA Software, however, you mentioned a Helpdesk in your example. Could you please let us know which JIRA applications you have and what you are planning to use in order to achieve the scenario you want?

In JIRA Service Desk, the configuration you want can be easily achieved by adding the third-party users as Collaborators on JIRA Service Desk.

Collaborators can only perform internal comments on JIRA, so it would not be visible by the customers.

In JIRA Core/Software, it is not possible to set the comment visibility through E-mail, so the only way to perform such restriction would be if the third-party user were added as a JIRA Core user and manually added the comment in the JIRA UI, selecting which roles should be able to access the comment.

Let us know if this information helps.

[Johan]

Hi Petterson, I am doing well thanks. 

Maybe I can explain this a bit better, apologies. 

We are running JIRA Service Desk 3.16.1 with Jira Software 7.13.1. ( Change has already been logged for the upgrade to the latest version )

We have a Callcentre logging tickets directly on the portal and incoming tickets via email. 

We are also using the JETI plugin to forward tickets to external users. But the problem is, when those users reply, it adds a comment that gets forwarded back to the original reporter. So I would like the comments coming in to be added as internal for a set of users. 

I have followed your suggestion and it sounds like the Collaborators or the jira-servicedesk-users group membership will resolve this in theory. So I added my external account to this. Logged a ticket with my internal account and forwarded the email to my external account. But when I reply to that email, the email just seems to be ignored now. So the comment never gets created on the ticket. 

[Johan]

So I think I just figured it out. I added my external user to the "jira-users" group and now the comment is being added as internal. But this obviously consumes a jira license. Is there no other way of limiting a specific group of users to internal comments only?