Initial Setup - Need Guidance!

[Kevin Parenteau]

Greetings!  My business is growing into the MSP space and I am trying to find a Help Desk solution, and not sure if Jira is the answer or if I should find an alternative.  

I am a one man shop right now, but soon will be expanding, so I am putting things in place for my customers to plan for growth and collaboration with future team members.  I am familiar with Helpdesk solutions like Spiceworks, but want to try Jira.

The workflow is largely inbound tickets from Email.  Users send an email to an email address (Office 365) and the ticket system pulls it in and creates the ticket, and then emails back and forth for management and comments about the ticket and updates.  Pretty simple.  I have multiple clients, so my goal would be to "group" tickets together on a per-domain basis (for reporting, etc.) and automatic assignment to the client's group, or space or whatever.  (Example:  Pull up all open tickets for CLIENT1, or CLIENT2)

My issue is trying to figure out how to use this thing...  I have seen videos, read some documentation, added a dedicated Office 365 user account (Exchange Online Plan 1) and completed the auth, etc.  But it's not working at all when I send that account an email.  I am new to Jira, and I am not sure what to do!

Thank you,
Kevin

[Sam Nadarajan · Accepted solution]

Hello Kevin,

Congrats on the growth plans, and awesome that you're setting yourself up for long term success.

Here's some Atlassian documentation that sheds some light into how emailing requests works in Jira. If it's not working still we'll need to better understand what your other configurations are.

As far as initial setup and guidance, you can start here and comb through additional documentation to get you up and going. If you need more support, feel free to let me know and I can help steer you in the right direction.

Cheers,

Sam

[Kevin Parenteau]

Sam,

First of all, thank you for your response and offering of assistance!  After a more thorough look, I just realized there are 2 sections where you can add the email account.  After adding to the Project Settings area directly, I finally see an inbound test request!  Can you please explain the difference in the following email settings?

System Settings:  Gear Icon > Mail > Incoming Mail
This is where I started, but it never worked to see a ticket created

Project Settings:  Project > Project Settings > Email Requests
This is what I just enabled and it worked to create a new ticket

Questions

1. What is the difference between the System Email settings and the Project Settings?
2. When a user emails in from any source (external domain, gmail, internal, etc.) it seems to create a user.  Does this count towards a user license requirement or will licensing requirements be limited to me as the Admin, and any team members I add to this account?
   • Note:  The main concern here is I have a lot of end users from various domains that will email requests.  I am hoping I don't need to license each one of them.
3. When a user emails in, I noticed an auto response is generated.  Where do I change this template so I can customize it to my branding and verbiage?
4. What options are there to "group" together requests from different domains?  Meaning if I have multiple requests from a specific domain, they're grouped or categorized together for that client.

I am going to tinker with this for a bit to try to learn more about this system, but these questions will be greatly helpful towards my greater understanding of how JIRA can work for me.

Thank you,
Kevin

[Kevin Parenteau]

Sam,

Okay, so in testing, I am running into something else.  The automated messages from Jira are coming from (jira@MYPROJECT.atlassian.net). Is it possible for those those messages to be sent from the same custom email address as the one I have connected such as (support@mydomain.com)?

Thank you,
Kevin

[Sam Nadarajan]

Hello Kevin,

1. The system email settings cover incoming mail settings for your entire Jira site instead of a particular project. Project email settings are scoped to just that one particular project. You can use the System email settings to configure the creation of issues and adding comments straight from an email, but these settings would primarily affect users in Jira Software Jira Work Management. Since you're already looking at Jira Service Management for support needs, you'd want to stay in the project settings one. You can read more about the system email settings here.
2. Emailed requests from users not in your system will not be created as licensed users, instead they will automatically be created as customers. In Jira, users are typically licensed users who have access to the agent (support staff) side of Jira. Customers in Jira refer to anyone that can create a request in a service project and do not require a license. They can access the portal that you configure for your service project or email a request to a specific email. Jira Service Management allows for unlimited customers at no cost, so you do not need to worry about a surprise charge for more people raising requests in your service project. If you want anyone to email your support desk, then you would need to change your customer permissions. For more information on how the email request process works, check here. Additionally, if you want to become more familiar with configuring your service project, check here.
3. Project Settings > Customer Notifications.
4. You might want to leverage the organizations functionality in Jira Service Management Cloud.

For your last question in your most recent comment, I believe that is not possible, but not entirely sure. 

[Kevin Parenteau]

Sam - I think I have most of this figured out, thank you for your guidance!  I do have one last thing I could use assistance with.  I am reading around and apparently others are having the same issue as well.

When a customer sends an email inbound, the issue is created, notifications look good, and all of that.  But the thing that is missing is assigning the issue to the organization automatically based on the email domain.

I have been messing around with the Automation and trying to find a way to accomplish this and not having much luck either.  I would love for this to be automated if possible.

Thanks!
Kevin

[Sam Nadarajan]

Hello Kevin,

It doesn't look like that functionality is available yet, here's a ticket that you can vote on to bring it up more to Atlassian's attention.

Until that issue is resolved, I think you may need to look at some custom scripting options.

[Kevin Parenteau]

Sam,

Fantastic, I appreciate your assistance once again.  I will see what options I have for automating assigning to Organizations.

Thank you,
Kevin