Better @ mentioning in Jira Service Management

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi all, 

We've recently improved @ mentioning in Jira Service Management. This has been highly requested over the years so we made some changes to make your lives easier. 

I'd love to hear any feedback you have so we can better understand the impact of this work on your day to day experience with the product. 

The changes we made were: 

1. Portal experience: End users can @ mention any user that they are allowed to add as a Request Participant. This means that, if the service desk has organisations configured and the end user is a member, they can @ mention anyone within their organisation. They also can @ mention any other user that the agent has added to the ticket as a Request Participant.
2. Agent experience: Agents can now @ mention any request participant. They do, however, have to add them as a request participant first but can immediately @ mention them once they have done that (this allows admins to disable this feature by hiding the "Request participants" field from the issue view).

Why can't agents @ mention any user? We are aware that many customers, particularly larger ones, may have thousands of users on their instance of JSM (in some cases, both internal and external). We want to broaden the pool of people that can be @ mentioned but will need to make sure we offer restrictions to respect privacy concerns first.

We plan on continuing to improve this experience, but I wanted to check in with JSM users to gauge your feedback. 

Would love to hear from you!

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Product Manager, Jira Service Management

[Jeyhun Gayibov]

Hi @Jehan Gonsalkorale , 
Thanks for introducing new feature. In my experience,

In my experience, I have faced situations when adding non-IT watchers/participants were restricted and managed through planned communications. That was done mostly for major, high-impact incident, but the rule was set for all issues.

I would say if the feature introduced may be adjusted or limited somewhere in the settings, that would be the optimal way to go. 

[Jeyhun Gayibov]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale sorry for offtop, I just noticed that you are assignee JSDCLOUD-106  (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-106 ). Don`t you mind to comment on the topic, as the feature is highly important for me and others who voted since 2013 :)

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi Jeyhun, I've updated the ticket to let people know that we still want to improve this functionality. I completely agree with you. There are customers asking for @ mentions without restrictions but that could cause issues when there are privacy concerns. 

I'm working with the team to prioritise this so we can start moving in that direction. 

I'll be providing updates as things progress. 

Best regards,

Jehan

[Yanty Ghani [ServiceRocket]]

Hi @Jehan Gonsalkorale ,

I see that if an internal user (that has Jira Software license) is mentioned in the comment, they will get both Jira notification (because of mentioned) and also customer notification. Is there a way to make them only receive one notification.

In the Jira notification, when they click on "View issue", the link goes to Jira view, and not to customer portal view, which gives them "You don't have access to this issue" message. And you do not want to add them to "Browse Project" permission because then they would be able to view internal comments. So the mention doesn't work well with notifications. Is there a way around this?

[MayYT]

Hello @Jehan Gonsalkorale  Jira team,

We have below issue and it has affected our customers.

In our Jira Service Management customer portal, when a user with only "Service Desk Customer" Role was mentioned@ in the comment at customer portal, the mentioned person will receive an Email notification about " XXX mentioned you on an issue".

However, the Issue Link in this "XXX mentioned you on an issue" Email will link to JIRA view (for example, browse/ issuekey)  rather than the JIRA Customer Portal view (for example,  servicedesk/ customer/ portal/ issuekey).

The user mentioned@ at the customer portal only has "Service Desk Customer" Role, so this user cannot access to the ticket by clicking the link in the email, because the link does not direct to JIRA Customer Portal view. Most users who are using customer portal only have "Service Desk Customer" Role.

It is reasonable that when a user is mentioned@ in the comment in a ticket at customer portal, the email should includes link to the JIRA Customer Portal view (servicedesk/ customer/ portal/ issuekey), is there any way to adjust this link in the "XXX mentioned you on an issue" Email, or it is just meaningless to mention someone in the Customer Portal if they cannot access the ticket.

Besides, we disabled the Customer Notification "Participant added" Email, because our customers only want to receive Email when they are mentioned in the comment. Therefore, we really need to have the correct Customer Portal Link in the "XXX mentioned you on an issue" Email.

Thanks a lot!

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @MayYT ,

Thanks for flagging this. I'll have a look into this and will get back to you. 

I'll be in touch,

Jehan

[MayYT]

Hello @Jehan Gonsalkorale  May I know if there is any update on this, thanks.

Our expected result is when a user is mentioned@ in the comment in a ticket at customer portal, the "XXX mentioned you on an issue" email should include url link to the JIRA Customer Portal view (for example, servicedesk/ customer/ portal/ issuekey) rather than the JIRA view (for example, browse/ issuekey).

[skipow]

@MayYT I believe I found a workaround for this - we are experiencing the same problem. It's not perfect, but it does seem to work. 

In the template editor, you can replace the ${request.url} variable with a link to your customer service portal and append the ${issue.key} variable instead. So for example:

"https://org_name.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/999/${issue.key}" 

A more comprehensive feature would be to direct the email recipient to either the Jira view or the Customer Portal view depending on their role, but at least for us this works.

[MayYT]

Hi @skipow , thanks for your suggestion!

However, from my understanding, regarding the email notification sent to people @mention tagged in the comment, it seems like this is a system email and there is no template in JIRA which cannot be modified or managed by JIRA site admin.

Or may I know how to modify @mention email ? Thanks.

[skipow]

@MayYT ah I see - you may be right. I thought the same info was shared in the customer notifications template for @mentions but I see now that's not the case. 

I support your use case and have a similar need. This really does discourage the use of @mentions for customers since the link is into Jira and not the customer service portal.

@Jehan Gonsalkorale anything else you can share on this?

[Dimitrios Danampasis]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale We are experiencing the same issue. It's been 4 months since your last update. Do you have any news on this? 

[Jehan Gonsalkorale]

Hi @Dimitrios Danampasis , 

Unfortunately, we are not focusing on this feature in the short-term but I will raise this again as a priority with our internal teams. 

Thanks for the prompt, I'll bring this to the attention of the right people. 

[Jay Keck]

Is there a jira tracking ticket for this? I'd like to keep track of any developments since my users are anxious for a fix/change for this?

[JONATHAN BOHLMANN]

[JSDCLOUD-1476] Unable to @mention Customer or Request Participant - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products. I believe is the ticket.

[Bharathi Kakilate]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale , It looks like there is no option for the customers to tag specific agents on the tickets to notify them. Could you please confirm?

Users with Agent permissions cannot be added to the "Shared With" on the ticket. And we cannot have a user with both agent and customer permission as it is messing with the comments on SLA. 

What is the solution given all the above restrictions on customers who would like to tag specific agents to notify them of the ticket (of their choice)?

[Megan]

I am interested in the response to this--our customers would like to be able to mention the agents that they are working with, but can't seem to do so unless the agent is added as a Request Participant, even if they have already commented on the issue.

[Bharathi Kakilate]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale any inputs on this ?

[Joseph Baca]

Our organization needs to be able to @ mention users without them being added as a request participant, so that we can draw attention to a request, while excluding them from receiving notifications on the ticket thereafter. This is a feature in Team-managed projects.

We've heavily promoted Company-managed projects to our organization and just migrated a team from a TM JSM project to a CM JSM project and this is a very undesirable find. Please release some options.

I've commented and voted on the shared enhancement request.

Thank you!

[Paul Stallworth]

@Jehan Gonsalkorale 

I'd encourage you to rethink this solution and consider adding some additional toggles, perhaps at the project level when it comes to mentions and privacy.  You shouldn't be making the determination at the instance level under the guise of "respecting privacy" as that's a cop out to not giving us the real answer as to why you're not implementing the requested behavior coming from JSDSERVER-1476 and JSDSERVER-5408.  There's something behind the scenes internally as to why this hasn't been resolved in a satisfactory manner for all the users that have commented over the last 9 years.

As you acknowledged and others have mentioned, in large organizations it is not uncommon for the need to exist to have customers put in an Approvers field AND need to be mentioned to generate a follow up notification for them to pay attention to the ticket.  Adding them as a Request Participant is an unnecessary additional step.

Why won't you give us more capabilities to better control who can/cannot be mentioned across all possible service desk customers?  Or peel back the curtain a little and give us a straight answer, even if it's "because money" or whatever.

Be the change you seek.