How to enable customers to request access from service desk portal (help center)?

[Casey Morrison]

We have a JSM service project which has a Help Center portal: a URL where customers can go to login and submit technical support tickets. We don't want to have unrestricted open access (https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-an-open-portal/), but we do want customers who have not yet been granted access to request access from our project's Help Center portal. How can we enable that?

[Benjamin Paton · Accepted solution]

Hey Casey, 

You do have an option here. You are able to se the Help Center as open, and then set internal projects to be restricted. 

You can do this via Project settings > Customer permissions > Service project access

Change the setting to Customers added by agents and admins. Customers will be able to create their own account, but they wont be able to see any projects configured this way.

Your Agents can then add appropriate people to internal projects via the Customers page.

Let me know if this would be useful for you. Otherwise I am keen to hear how you might have it work.

Cheers, 

Ben.

[Casey Morrison]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the suggestion. This would work for us, provided the knowledge base articles associated with my projects are not searchable by customers who have self-created an account but have not yet been granted access to an internal project.

The problem I am facing is I have set the Customer Permissions > Can customers create their own accounts? > Yes, by signing up or sending a request setting, and yet when I visit the help center using a browser where I am not logged in to JSM, all I see is "Log in to Help Center" where the user is expected to enter their email and password. There is no "sign up" or "request access" button. So, I'm not sure what the Customer Permissions option I have selected is actually doing, if anything.

[Benjamin Paton]

Only the knowledge bases linked to projects accessible by a user can be searched.

A new customer will see the requests from the publicly accessible project (I would suggest creating a request type in your external project for "Request access"). When they click into a request, it will contains an additional required field for "Email confirmation to". After submitting a request the user will get an email sent to that address with the ticket information. The email will also contain a prompt to setup their account.

Accounts created this way will not have access to internal projects until explicitly granted.

Your new customers could also email the support address, or follow prompts on the Login page to create a new account.

[Casey Morrison]

Great! This did the trick. We've got what we need now: a restricted-access project and a public-access project with just one request type: Request Access. Our agents will review incoming requests from the public-access project and "add" customers to the private project(s) when requests are deemed to be legitimate. Thanks Ben!

[Benjamin Paton]

Great news. There is a feature request ticket for this type of functionality if you wanted to provide any ongoing feedback

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-790

Have a great day!

[Jack Brickey]

You can’t do that on the portal. If you have a company website consider placing an email request solution there which creates a request in another project. Then you can police that and decide if to grant access.

[Casey Morrison]

Thanks Jack. That's unfortunate that such a feature doesn't exist. Seems like it would be a sensible middle ground between a completely-public portal and an invitation-only portal (which seem to be the only two options currently).

Our company website currenly links to the portal. To implement what you suggest, we'll need to change that a bit to have a page which includes a "request access" button (to generate an email requesting access) and an embedded "frame" for the portal itself (for those who already have access). I'll see if our web folks can do this.