Jira Service Management direct access to attachments via email!

[#1]

Jira Service Management can be used to help many different types of customers in many different ways. For many customers, raising support through emails is one of the easiest and most convenient ways. These customers get email notifications whenever someone comments on one of their requests or tags them in a comment on a request. Comments may include attachments, which are added to the email notifications.

Today we are excited to announce that you can configure how your customers access attachments in email notifications! This means you can allow your customers to download attachments directly from email notifications, without logging in, making the support process smoother than ever.

What is changing?

We’re improving the way users interact with attachments in outgoing customer email notifications. Currently, if an attachment is included in a notification, it’s included as a link in the email notification. Attempting to access the attachment redirects to the portal’s hosted location of the attachment, requiring the user to login to the site to retrieve the full attachment. This can be time-consuming and inconvenient for customers who mainly use email as a way to communicate. 

To better enable service desks that primarily operate via email, we’re adding a configurable setting to the customer notifications page. Customers on a paid plan will be able to download common attachment files (e.g. pdf word, excel etc.) directly from the notification email without the need to log in.

How do I enable login-less attachments for my JSM project?

You must be a project administrator to set up the attachment security of customer notifications.

To configure attachment security in customer notifications:

For company managed projects:

1. From your service project, go to Project settings > Customer notifications.

For team managed projects:

1. From your service project, go to Project settings > Notifications > Customer notifications.

2. Find the Attachment security section and select an option for your service project.

3. Select: Download attachments via a secured link (without logging in)

Customers can download attachments via a uniquely generated link without the need to log in to the portal to authenticate. This option is ideal if your service project uses email as the only support channel.

The links can’t be guessed or accidentally discovered but they can be downloaded by anyone on the web with the link. Learn more about how customers access attachments.

A link will automatically expire 28 days after it’s generated, or they can be immediately invalidated by deleting the comment that contains the relevant attachment. If you decide to change this setting, all previously generated links will be invalidated and the customer will have to login in order to download the attachment.

[TheAdmin]

Is this option available in trial mode? We had the Attachment security section a few days under Customer notifications, but now it's gone and although at that time we have set it to Download attachments via a secured link (without logging in), it didn't work (Customers couldn't load the attachment due to Error 400, Bad Request) and no secure links were generated for attachments.

[Michelle Tan]

Hi @TheAdmin , this feature is available if you're evaluating one of the following plans: Standard, Premium and Enterprise!

Sorry about that - we temporarily turned off this feature over the weekend because we encountered some unexpected bugs with plain text emails. This issue only affects a small number of users who use plaintext emails only, the fix is done and will be rolled out tomorrow!

[Yannick Biet]

Not working on our JSM projects, the page can't be loaded in Settings:

[David Meredith]

I've raised a support ticket also. This feature isn't yet visible in our instance... Did it fully get rolled out?

[Michelle Tan]

Hi @Yannick Biet @David Meredith

This feature has been rolled out to 100% so if you are on a Standard, Premium or Enterprise plan you should be able to access this feature! If you are using Release tracks, the feature will available depending on your track options.

[David Meredith]

Hey Michelle,

Have it my sandbox now thanks, this makes the OOB mail functionality quite a bit more usable when dealing with external partners.

Is there any good practice / documentation on how to engage with external parties effectively using JSM e-mail? For example, sending documents to a recruiter with salary proposals would be confidential to the applicant but you'd want to record all of your activity into a single ticket ideally, request particpants get every public comment and external parties won't get internal comments?

We can do this with addons but communicating with multiple parties confidentially should be a basic out of the box functionality...

[Yannick Biet]

Hi @Michelle Tan still not working here, can't load the settings on "customer notifications" entry in the menu.

Will raise a case to support to understand

[Keith Johnson]

What version of Jira data center is this available for or is this only for cloud?

[Tobias Neumann]

Hi,

Will this feature also be available for the data center on-premise version of JSM? Thanks ahead!

[Athena Petridou [Nimaworks]]

Hello there,

I have enabled this functionality, but now, every time I click on the link of an attachment on an email notification, I am navigated to the portal and specifically to the issue (like when you click on the "View Request" link) and no file is being downloaded.

[Michelle Tan]

Hi @Keith Johnson @Tobias Neumann

This feature is only available on Jira Service Management Cloud at the moment!

[Michelle Tan]

Hi @Athena Petridou [Nimaworks] ,

Could you please contact support and provide them additional details so we can look into this?

[Yannick Biet]

Final word abou the "bug"

Atlassian think it is a good idea to add in Jira an adminstration menu entry that implies to have a Jira Service Management Licence to load.

Despite I am full admin on JIRA, I was unable to load the menu until I enable a JSM licence

This is not a smart move as I am *not* a JSM Agent so my company does not want to pay an extra licence just to select the "Download Attachement" option.

Maybe in the future, the error message as well will be meaningfull to clearly stage this is a licence issue.

[Michelle Tan]

Hi @Yannick Biet ,

I understand your pain point, unfortunately anyone who interfaces with JSM projects needs to be a licensed user. But thanks for your feedback, I've noted this experience is confusing and passed this onto the relevant team around improving the error message :) 

Cheers,

Michelle

[Marie Phillips]

Hi, we just tested this feature and it looks like it only applies to attachments made in the Notes/reply to customer section. We do not see the link or attachment from the email sent to the JIRA project that generated ticket. i.e. if an attachment is sent in email that generates the ticket, then the attachment will not be included in notification emails. Is that how it is supposed to work?

Thank you,
Marie

[Lokesh Siddappa]

Could you please let us know how do we stop or disable the feature where the a link will automatically expire 28 days after it’s generated, We want to keep the Link active...

[Galit Oran]

Hello folks, Thanks for reaching out.

@Marie Phillips - This feature is available for customer notifications only, meaning only when replying to customers from JSM. I'd recommend reaching out to Support for this feature request.

@Lokesh Siddappa  - I understand the pain point, but due to security reasons, the link can only be active for 28 days. 

[Shane Johnson]

How do we use this in an automation that sends an email...? I can't find the correct syntax. 

[Shane Johnson]

?? Can anybody answer my previous question? How do I generate or access the link that is created? I'd like to add that link to external emails that I generate manually. 

[Adolfo Eloy]

Hi @Shane Johnson ,

Before proceeding, just make sure that login-less attachment is enabled from within Project Settings/Customer Notifications as follows:

The way to send an email from Automation to a customer is to add a comment (there's an action for that) with "share with customer" comment visibility. Then all you have to do is to add the attachment represented as a variable in the comment.

To create the variable to be added to the comment, add a then action named "create a variable" using {{#changelog.attachment}}{{toString}}{{/}} as the smart value. For the purposes of this example let's consider logLastAttachment as the variable name.

Then, to add the attachment as a variable to the comment, add another then action named "Add comment to issue" with the following content (just a short example here):

[^{{logLastAttachment}}]

It may be the case that you want only notifications with attachments to be sent. If that's the case, you can also add a condition to check if logLastAttachment variable is not empty as follows (the screenshot below also presents how you can structure your automation rule with the variable, conditions and the comment action):

For more about smart values for JSM, the following link may be useful:

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-issues/#--changelog--

Please let me know if this shed some light to your question.

Kind regards

[Roddy Pratt]

So this isn't on the free plan???

That's unfortunate.

[Joseph Green]

If the option 'Download attachments by logging in to the portal' is selected, does that mean when a user that is NOT logged in, tries to view the attachment they will receive an error message? 

I'm running into issues on my company managed service management project. Where I have customers that are unable to view the attachments we send them, and receive the following error(see attached photo) = 

[Adolfo Eloy]

Hi @Joseph Green , 

Given the scenario you described, the customer should be redirected to the portal and login on the portal to be able to download the attachment, but an error message.

A few things I would suggest checking are:

1. the current state of this project (is it archived?)
2. what about the requests (any chance the request was deleted?)
3. any changes concerning permissions?

Kind regards

[Joseph Green]

@Adolfo Eloy - Hi - 

1. It is an active company managed project. 
2. This has happened in multiple requests. None were deleted.
3. One pattern I've noticed related to permissions, is that each customer that submitted these email requests do not seem to have an active or logged in profile within Jira. When I hover over their name and try to view their profile, it directs me to a page that says the following - 

   Looks like we’re off the beaten track

   We landed here for a user that does not exist.
   Head back to the directory to search for another user.

   I think my issue is tied to #3 above. Should our customers be logged in to Jira in order to view the attachments we send them? 

[Boris Berenberg - Modus Create]

For people looking to use this feature on DC. Our app Notification Assistant for Jira (DC link) supports attachments directly on the emails we send with a few restrictions https://atlasauthority.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/NAFJ/pages/1999798280/Attachment+Restrictions.

For people who want this feature on Cloud with more control of Template design, and the ability to include Attachments from fields other than the customer reply, you can check out the Cloud version of Notification Assistant for Jira.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out via our support portal: https://atlasauthority.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1/group/1/create/1