Help Center & Portals visibility and management

[Henri Virtanen!]

Hi all!

I have a couple of big questions concerning about the Help Center and the portals. We are running JiraSD Server version and we have multiple SD-projects, which can be categorized as following:

Internal JiraSD-projects
(only users that are add to customers have access to project). Our company employees are added to these projects as a customers via LDAP-synchronization, we create a user group 'company_all' where we synchronize the users -> the user group 'company_all' is projects customer role-group.

1. Project 1 (Internal IT): Limited access for just to our own company end users. Meant to give desktop, software, network etc. support for end user problems. Dedicated IT-team handles the issues.
2. Project 2 (Internal Jira support for JiraSW/JiraSD/Confluence): Limited access for just to our own company end users. Dedicated to Jira-related issues, because Jira is one of our biggest software that almost all company users use and it is critical to our business in projects and in service business. Dedicated Jira-team handles the issues.
3. Project 3 (Internal customer projects support): Limited access for just to our own company end users. This project is used when example our customer project needs a new server or software. Dedicated Cloud service IT-team handles these issues.

Public JiraSD-projects
(Access to projects is public, anyone can raise a request from the portal)

1. Project 4 (Software support for product X): Dedicated service team handles the issues concerning product X
2. Project 5 (Software support for product Y): Dedicated service team handles the issues concerning product Y
3. Project 4 (Software support for product X): Dedicated service team handles the issues conserning product X
4. Project 6 (Software support for product Z): Dedicated service team handles the issues concerning product Z
5. Project 7 (IT support): Dedicated service team handles the issues from our customers, where we have delivered IT equipment

In our JiraSD instance Help Center:

• Our end user customers see the portals for Projects 4-7
• Our own employees see the portals from Projects 1-7

And now for the questions:

Question 1: Visibility of the portals at the Help Center
Portals from projects 4-7 are public, but what if we do not want that customers can see them in the global help center? We want to limit it so, that the customers from Project 5 sees only Portal 5 if they happen to go to the Help Center and etc.

Question 2: Grouping of portals
Is there a way to combine the request types of Projects 1-3 under a one Portal or view? Our company employees want a SPOC (single point of contact) kind of view&portal to all our internal IT issues, they don't want to go to the top level of Help Center where they now see the portals from projects 1-7.

All help would be greatly appreciated!

[Janette _Refined]

Hi Henri,

You could set up the following with RefinedTheme which should cover most of your use cases. This example is using two separate sites but you could also set it up using one site with multiple categories.

Use two sites

By default RefinedTheme creates one site that is the “Help Center”. It is accessible for logged in users but you can also allow anonymous users to view it. Users will still need to create an account if they want to raise a request. By default all service desk projects will be visible under the Help Center site.

You can add another site, “Internal Site” from the RefinedTheme Site Builder and configure it to be viewable only by a certain user group, in your case the group “company_all”. You will also be able to define the URL context path for the site (for example https://your-jira.com/plugins/servlet/desk/site/internal). This will allow you to set up a redirect to this url on your server if you wish to (for example https://internalsupport.your-jira.com) . You can then drag & drop the internal service desks projects (1-3) from the “Help Center” under this site which will make them show up only under the “Internal Site”. 

Sites in the Site Builder, Help Center is viewable by anonymous users and Internal Site is viewable only by users from the group company_all

Help internal users to navigate to the correct site

To help the internal users to navigate to the Internal Site from the Help Center, you can use the modules from RefinedTheme. You can for example add a navigation highlight module on the Help Center and place it in section that restricts it's visibility to only group company_all. 

Show all request types 

You can use the Request types module to show request types for a specific project. In your use case you can add the module to the Internal Site three times, once for each service desk project. This way all the request types will be visible on the same page. 

 
Help Center with three modules:

1. Navigation Highlight only visible to users in group company_all
2. Search Highlight
3. Navigation icons for the Service Desk Projects

Internal Site with three modules

1. Search Highlight
2. Request types module configured to show request types only from project "JIRA & Confluence"
3. Request types module configured to show request types from project  "Internal IT"

I hope this was helpful, please ask if anything is unclear. 
 

Hyvää kesää!

Regards,
Janette Hagerlund, RefinedWiki

[Bojana Vasic]

Hi Janette,

Please correct me if I am wrong, but RefinedWiki does not cover the requirement to limit customers to see just their project on the global helpdesk;

- We want to limit it so, that the customers from Project 5 sees only Portal 5 if they happen to go to the Help Center...even if there are Jira projects which are open...

Thanks!

//Bojana

[Janette _Refined]

Hi Bojana,

You are correct, there is no way in RefinedTheme to say that a specific public projects should be excluded from the listing of Service Desk projects, but you can choose to remove the module all together (module is called Service Desks & Categories).

One of the features of RefinedTheme is a layout editor which allows you to specify which modules will be visible on the Help Center. The default is to show Search Highlight, Recent request types and Service desks & categories which is similar to how the Help Center without theming looks like.

There are multiple different ways to set up RefinedTheme to help the users to find the service desk project or a request type they are looking for. Here are a few features that can be used to achieve this:

• Using multiple sites (external / internal) with permissions - each site will have it's own landing page that can be configured with the layout editor
• Using multiple categories (external / internal) with permissions - each category will have it's own landing page that can be configured with the layout editor
• Using navigation modules to link to a category page, portal page or to straight to a request type on a project
• Using permissions on layout sections to hide content
• Using HTML module to include your own content

Regards,

Janette

[Bojana Vasic]

Thanks a lot for a detailed answer! :)

//Bojana

[Henri Virtanen!]

Hi @Janette _Refined and thank you for very detailed answer! :) We will try refined theme, the grouping of portals to a different sites could be an answer to our problem at Question 2.

But I'm still not sure how Refined Theme would help us with the visibility of open portals (like Bojana asked). Are the visibility permission handled/checked from the user groups or from the projects? If they are handled from the user groups, we would have to find a way to add automatically the customers from Project 4 (open to all) to a group called 'project4_customers' and Project 5 (open to all) to a group called 'project5_customers'.

Henri

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi Henri,

We too have a similar set up in our organization.  We have an internal IT service desk and we have many external customer service desks.  But it's not a problem, our customers are only customers in our external ones (sometimes one of them and sometimes two of them).  And as long as you create them as only a customer to that specific service desk that's all they will see when they go to the portal.  They will never see your internal one.

As far as grouping those service desks, there isn't anything out of the box.  This add-on would you let you do some branding and grouping of service desks:

Refined Theme for Jira Service Desk

Hope that helps

Susan

[_Fabian A. Lopez]

@Katarzyna 

can we limit request types access in the portal by a group if we organize our JSM customers in that way? Or should we use Organization to group customers?

Based on this article https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/jira-service-management-evaluator-resources/jira-service-management-grouping-customers-into-organizations

we can't group users by Jira groups, instead, we can use Organization. The question now is if we can control request visibility based on organization instead of Jira Groups.

[Katarzyna]

Hi @Henri Virtanen!,

Probably our app can help you solve this problem: Extension for Jira Service Desk. It offers a lot of features, but in your case Visibility will be the most interesting.

You can limit visibility of your customer portal to selected groups.

You can do the same with request types. So you can stores all needed request types in the one service-desk project but limit the visibility of them to selected groups of users.

This app also offers more options for visibility, such as fields or options. I recommend you to try and check if it works for you :)

In case of any questions or doubts, don't hesitate to ask me.

Kate

[Henri Virtanen!]

Hi @Katarzyna and thank you for your answer.

This app would likely to be a solution for us, but if i'm not wrong, the challenge here would be the group management of our customers. Correct me if I am wrong, but to get this app to work as we need it, we would need to add the customers from Project 4 (open to all) to a group called 'project4_customers' and Project 5 (open to all) to a group called 'project5_customers', just to limit the Project 4 portal visibility to Project 4 customers? If this is what is needed, is there a way to automatically add customers from Project X to a defined Jira group? Manual operation of customers to groups...never gonna happen. :)

Henri

[Katarzyna]

Hi @Henri Virtanen!,

Unfortunately, you're right. If your customers are added automatically to project X, you should manually added them to Jira groups. In this case, our feature Visibility works. But... You're idea is great! :) I've already discussed with our team and we decided to do it. So we will create a special feature which will add customers to Jira groups. Thanks to this, your Jira groups, such as 'project5_customers' will be always up-to-date. Please give us 3-4 weeks to develop it!

Kate

[Henri Virtanen!]

This sounds great! :) End customers are added automatically to project X customers when they send us email (open to all-type JiraSD project), so I have been looking a way to adding them to jira groups automatically, because this is not the first time and reason when we would have needed customers to be automatically added into Jira groups. I have assumed (and hoped) that JiraSD would have a own integrated feature to do it, but at least hopefully some app can do it in the future. ;)

I will be in summer vacation next 4 weeks, so hopefully you will have something for me to test when I'll return.

[Nani]

Hi all !!

 I am Stuck with same problem - Customers are only allowed to see their dedicated portals and also have signup option for new customers to raise the request. Did you resolve this one?  

Regards,

Nani