How to setup a company-private internal SD, and an external SD open to everyone?

[Demi Benson]

We have a completely internal-to-the-company portal for handling general IT requests. Permissions to access are via "Anyone with an account on %your_site_name%, by logging in". This works and we are happy with it.

Customer support wants to switch from Salesforce to using Jira Service Desk for managing customer support tickets. These customers are external ones from other businesses, who obviously do not have access to our Atlassian site. We want these customers to be able to create new tickets.

Based on the (somewhat confusing) docs at https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/global-customer-permissions-954239154.html , it appears that we cannot keep our internal SD with the customer permission of "Anyone with an account on %your_site_name%, by logging in" and also have the external SD available to external customers.

Some complications:

• When I was trying out various combinations or permission to prepare for the external SD, I switched the global setting for "Can customers create their own accounts?" to "Yes, by signing up or sending a request" and because I still only want  internal-to-the-company people to access the internal portal, I switched portal access to "Customers my team adds to the project", and immediately internal employees were not able to see their past tickets. Nowhere on the global customer permission page (linked above) or the project customer permission page does it indicate how my team would add people to the project (as customers, not agents); and even so, it would be an enormous hassle to try to manage every single new hire by adding them separately to the internal IT portal.
  • Even if we do switch over to team-managed internal customers, will they lose access to their previous tickets? This would also be a deal-breaker for us.
• Similar to above, when I switched the global setting for "Can customers create their own accounts?" to "Yes, by signing up or sending a request", and "Can customers access the help center without logging in?" to "Yes", a helpful popup told me that this would force our internal Confluence space to allow full anonymous access! That would be a disaster! How do switch global permissions to allow external customers, but prevent our internal-only Confluence spaces from being switched to anonymous access for even one second?

So how do I keep our internal IT helpdesk portal visible only to people in the company, while still letting external customers create tickets in the external portal, while keeping our internal Confluence internal?

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Demi,

Thanks for reaching out to Atlassian Community!
For customers outside the organization to create tickets, it will be necessary to let them create their own accounts and on "Customer permissions" set it to "Anyone can send a request", otherwise, when they access the portal they will see a message that they don't have access to any portals and when they send an email to create a ticket, no ticket will be created and an error will appear in the logs.
The best option, in this case, is to create a separated project for external customers, so you can let it open for anyone outside the organization and the other project can be private for internal customers.

Regards,
Angélica

[Demi Benson]

I know that I have to set "Customer permissions" to "Anyone can send a request", and create a new project. 

I'm looking for advice on

• how to do so without having to separately manage every single internal user's access to the internal portal and our internal Confluence
• how to keep our internal Confluence completely internal (i.e. without granting full anonymous access to the whole internet)

[Angélica Luz]

If you need a private Service Desk, admins will have to manually manage the customers and users, there is no other option besides that.

The confluence space will be accessible only for those who access the customer portal to search, it will not be available for other people outside the portal.

[Demi Benson]

If you need a private Service Desk, admins will have to manually manage the customers and users, there is no other option besides that.

Is there at least an API? Or can I copy-and-paste a whole list of accounts? 

Because while I have less than 100 to do right now, that would be impossible for a company of 1000+.

[Jack Brickey]

Demi,

if you can create a CSV list of all customer emails you can paste that into the Add customer dialog box. If you are using Organizations then first enter the org and then add in the org view.

[Demi Benson]

I've already got all employees added via our separate auth mechanism and access to our internal Confluence. When I switch to only people added by my team, and then add all the email addresses as you suggest, will that create new customer accounts (and require new passwords)?

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Demi,

If they still don't have a password to access the customer portal, they will receive an invitation saying that they were invited to the portal and a link to finish the account setup:

If they already have a password to access the portal, they will receive this email:

[Erik Vanderstraeten]

I'm sorry to reply to an old post, but I want to share something related.
Hopefully it helps somebody out there.

As mentioned above, we also wanted to have a public portal for external people to contact us.
Besides that we have some internal service desks for our colleagues.

We are using Atlassian Access in order to give all our organizational users access to the Jira Service Desks.

Atlassian Support just informed me how we can achieve that:

• Global setting: allow customers to create accounts.
• The public service desk gives access to "anyone on the web"
• The internal service desk gives access to "Customers added by agents and admins"
  • Additionally, under Project Settings > People, we add "All members for directory" group and give it the role "Service Desk Customer".
  • This makes all users that come from Atlassian Access to appear as Customers in the Service Desk project. 

[Nikolaus Vales]

But aren't that way all accounts which come to the internal Project billable accounts ? Because we got that setup and everyone which comes from Access have site-access. So we got to pay for our internal users.