Provide linked issues via Jira Service Desk Portal

[Stephen Padgett]

I am setting up ITIL-based change requests in the Jira Service Desk Portal and it seems I can't input linked issues (it says not allowed on the portal), so how do I effectively provide a list of references to the Issues/Bugs/Enhancements/Features that are resolved by the change?  It seems logical to me that you would just enter them as linked issues, but maybe I am missing something.

[Radosław Cichocki]

Piece of cake if you've got Extension for Jira Service Desk.
Here's the functionality you're looking for.

[Dzmitry Hryb _Deviniti_]

Exactly! Here's a tutorial of mine on how to set it up, and many other customizations you can do with this app.

[Deleted user]

That is a good one but it seems to not be available on Cloud yet. 

[Dzmitry Hryb _Deviniti_]

@[deleted] fortunately, you're wrong :D

Here's a doc on how to configure this and more additional information on the Customer Portal in the Cloud version of the app.

[Julie d'Antin [Elements]]

Hi Stephen, 

Currently, it is not possible to display linked issues in the customer portal natively. There's an open feature request for that, which you can watch and vote. 

I work at Valiantys Software, and we have an alternative solution with our app Elements Copy & Sync. It can allow you to display your linked issues on the customer portal in a data panel as show below: 

See this tutorial for reference, it explains how to set Elements Copy & Sync up for this. 

To sync comments, you can also use Elements Copy & Sync as presented in this tutorial. 

This is not a native solution, but I hope this will help you provide your customers with visibility on linked issues.

Cheers, 

Julie

[Andy Heinzer]

The customer portal does not have a means to display linked issues at this time.  There is an open feature request for this ability over in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-4636   I would recommend that you vote/comment on this issue if this is something you would like to see in JIRA Service Desk.
The customer portal has a much more restricted view.  However I believe this is by design in order to help facilitate helpdesk/service desk interactions of this nature.    

You can still link these issues together, but this is something that would only be visible to Agents or JIRA Software/Core users (who can login to the main JIRA site URL) and not to Service Desk Customers (who can only visit the customer portal URL).  Instead, the process we use when this happens in Atlassian support is to actually provide in the reply to the customer the specific bug ticket URL (kind of like I did above for that feature request).

The concern here though should also be whether or not that user has access to be able to view the issue you are linking to them.  If they cannot, then it really doesn't help them much to understand or track the progress of this issue.  In this case that issue is viewable to the public, so you can see/track this other issue.

Issue linking in JIRA still has usefulness in Service Desk projects.  It can help your Agents to link the same issue together when the have the same cause or better help them track and understand if another project/issue is being used to track the progress of a fix.   But at this time, the issue links made between issues in JIRA is not something that users in the Service Desk customer role are going to be able to see.

[Stephen Padgett]

My problem is not linking issues, it is specific to change requests (and I do realize that a change request is just a type of issue, but ITIL treats them quite differently).  I agree that linking issues is useful, but linking Change Requests is required.   You need to be able to see which issues are implemented by a change request in order to provide approvers (which are usually business owners) with the proper documentation of what is being changed.  You need to be able to look at a bug, enhancement, or incident in the ITIL world and know which change request implemented it, so it is essentially a two way link.   And I want that single pane of glass so that I don't have to tell my business users "you go here (the portal) for an incident, but since the system can't handle change requests through the portal, you have to go here to do a change request".  This seems like pretty standard ITIL based requirements.

[Jack Brickey]

I am wondering if maybe you could use KB to achieve this? Such as, create a KB page for each release that captures all fixes etc. in the release. Then customer could enter say 3.5.2 Release Notes in "find help..." search window.

might not be the solution you desire.