New! Restrict your internal notes to project roles or groups

[#1]

Hello everyone! 👋

We’re excited to announce a new feature for Jira Service Management. You can now restrict the visibility of internal notes, based on your project roles and groups. 🎉

Sometimes, teams need to have private discussions about customer requests, and in the case of particularly sensitive topics these discussions may need to be confidential between only a few team members (such as those in your HR or Legal teams).

With the ability to restrict the visibility of internal comments, you can now continue those confidential discussions on the issue itself, rather than transferring to email or other tools to keep the information private.

Using internal note restrictions

Navigate to an issue and open the issue view. Find the comment section, and start creating an internal note. Then, select the Comment visibility button. By default, internal notes are visible to all internal users of your service project, so you’ll see an open lock icon (or if you’re using a screen reader, hear 'Visible to all users').

Once you’ve opened the menu, choose which group or role you’d like to restrict this comment to. Now, save your comment!

Only the comment creator and users added to the selected group or project role will see this comment once it’s saved, meaning you can continue to work knowing your confidential request information will stay private to you and your team.

Find our more about project roles in Jira Service Management, or learn how to create and manage your groups.

If you’re a Jira admin, you can also choose whether your team can restrict comments to both Groups and Project roles, or only restrict to Project roles.

Go to Global Settings, then Settings, then General Configuration. Select Edit Settings, and find the Comment visibility setting in the Options section. Select Project Roles only if your team only needs to restrict comments to project roles, or select Groups & Project Roles to allow your team members to restrict to either. It’s important to remember that this setting will apply across every project on your site - not just to Jira Service Management.

What's next?

Our engineering team has been hard at work bringing this highly requested feature from Jira to Jira Service Management. Now, based on your feedback, we’ll be exploring future updates to make this feature work even better.

We’d love to hear from you, so add comments below if you have any questions or feedback for the team.

Best regards,

Sarah Campbell

Designer || Jira Service Management

[Geraldine Gordon]

I've been following this request for a long time and unfortunately this does not meet my original request. I wonder if you will extend this to cover the option to respond to certain external people, i.e. a participant or the approver as there are times where you may have a question just for that person

[Vedant Kulkarni]

Handy feature.

[Ciara TN]

@Sarah Campbell Is this only for Cloud or will it be coming to DC also? 

[Sarah Campbell]

@Geraldine Gordon Thanks for the feedback. We have more work we'd like to do on this feature, so I'll send your feedback to the team. Would you expect specific options, e.g. 'restrict to approver' or the general ability to restrict to any user you choose?

[María Pérez Castro]

@Sarah Campbell it's a very necessary feature also in Jira Service Management projects.

Please could you clarify if you will include this enhancement also for Data Center or only for Cloud?

And in which version? Thanks in advance.

[Rafael Matos]

Great update, I've been waiting for this for a long time.

As a suggestion, it should be possible to choose which permission should be the default, instead of the default being visible to everyone.

[Rudy Holtkamp]

Hi @Sarah Campbell ,

It would also be nice to visually see that the comment is restricted to a role/group/... 
In a JSM project the background of internal comments is yellow, customer facing comments white, so another color (or icon or whatever you can think of) would stand out that the comment is restricted.

[Ed Osborn]

Is there (or will there be) a way to set a default visibility for a project? So all internal comments default to being visible to a given group, and other stakeholders could have a JSM license, have a stakeholder role in the project and have full view of the issues, but not the internal comments?

[Yatish Madhav]

Thank you - this is great! 

I will use this more and share with some of our power users. 

If a restricted user is @ mentioned on a restricted comment will they be able to see it and will they be notified of this?

Thank you

[Angela Stephens]

I’d appreciate the reverse functionality (perhaps via a user, project, or system settings) that sets the default visibility to project roles or groups and exposing a comment to others must be specifically selected. 

[Tyler Krzanowski]

I turned on the ability to use Groups and Project Roles but when entering an internal comment, the dropdown list is very limited.  You can scroll down a little bit but there are lots of groups missing.  Would be nice to either scroll to see all the groups or add the ability to search or start typing the group name.  

[Zdeněk]

I have tried this feature but I don't understand this. We have several project roles in our site but the selection of project roles in the restriction is very limited, most of the time only "Administrator" project role can be selected. All groups are available though. 

Can you please explain why? 

[Dietmar Doerschlag]

@Sarah Campbell  thanks for introducing us to this new feature. This is very relevant and really cool. I can see this being being very attractive to many of my clients. 

I just tried this out in a new JSM instance I spun up today (June 26). I can only get this to work as an "all or nothing" setting - either to restrict it to Admins Role only, or to not restrict it (default) and it can be accessed by all users. I cannot get the restrictions by group membership and / or project roles to work as you explained i t (those options do not even show up). I looked at permission scheme settings, created project roles and groups with membership - it just does not work. Can you explain that please? Is this feature only partially released?

[Sarah Campbell]

@Yatish Madhav - Good question! If a restricted user is @ mentioned on a restricted comment, they won't be able to see it and won't be notified (as they don't have permission to view the note).

[Yatish Madhav]

OK got you - thanks @Sarah Campbell 

[Dietmar Doerschlag]

@Sarah Campbell  I am curious if you have any thoughts on the question I posted on June 26th? Thanks kindly.

[Jesús Rafael Martínez Jiménez]

@Sarah Campbell Hello, Is this feature available for all in cloud? I ask because it is not appearing in my JSM projects

[Rashi]

@Jesús Rafael Martínez Jiménez yes this feature is available for all the cloud customers.

[Jesús Rafael Martínez Jiménez]

@Rashi

I can't see the option like the other ones are showing, is this necessary to activate from some configuration?

[Rashi]

@Jesús Rafael Martínez Jiménez can you please check your global settings as mentioned in this article - 

Find our more about project roles in Jira Service Management, or learn how to create and manage your groups.

If you’re a Jira admin, you can also choose whether your team can restrict comments to both Groups and Project roles, or only restrict to Project roles.

Go to Global Settings, then Settings, then General Configuration. Select Edit Settings, and find the Comment visibility setting in the Options section. Select Project Roles only if your team only needs to restrict comments to project roles, or select Groups & Project Roles to allow your team members to restrict to either. It’s important to remember that this setting will apply across every project on your site - not just to Jira Service Management.

[Aaron P.]

Hi @Sarah Campbell 
The idea for this implementation is appears in the list only the role & groups of each project, or all rol and goups for all projects?

I tried this but appears all groups as Tyler K Krzanowski explains and not is possible select the gruop that I need.

[Aaron P.]

Hi everyone
A request has been made to have this implementation show only the groups for each project.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-15031

[Robert Banister]

It's great that this feature is available now, thank you.  What would make it better is if there was a project setting that allowed you to choose the default Role or Group you're internally commenting to, so you don't have to select it manually every single time as I can foresee accidents happening. 

[Stephan Schmitz]

Ever needed to share your screen with a client or co-worker, but did not wanted them to see your internal / restricted comments on a Jira issue?

For this use case I created a browser extension (Chrome/Edge/Firefox) which adds a button to the activity feed of every issue page in the Jira cloud to let you toggle the visibility of restricted comments.

This allows to share your screen without sharing restricted / sensitive information.

Source and links to the stores can be found here: https://github.com/eyecatchup/toggle-restricted-jira-comments?tab=readme-ov-file#installation