Limit portal customer access to specific project

[aaronmoreng]

Hello,

We are starting to use Service Management internally for our IT ticketing software and this is all under an "IT service management" project. We have been asked to extend the ticketing software to our external customer facing website to allow anyone from the web to submit a help ticket through the widget. I created a "customer service" type project to handle these tickets to help separate them from the internal IT service tickets. 

When the external customer (who we won't know at the time of ticket submission) sends a ticket, they receive back an email with a link to view their issue on the Jira portal. I noticed that the user can click back to the "home" page of the entire portal which shows them both the the customer service project portal and the internal IT service project portal. 

I'd like to limit any tickets submitted through this widget/project to only let those users see the customer service project if they navigate to the portal on their "view ticket" link. 

I have seen some suggestions to manually add these customers to a specific group to limit their access to other projects, however I am not sure if this makes sense because the users will be unknown to us at the time they submit the ticket. Is there perhaps an automation to add any users who submit a ticket to this project to be added to a group which limits access to only that project on the portal?

Any tips are appreciated, thank you!

[Joseph Chung Yin · Accepted solution]

@aaronmoreng -

Just to confirm that your statement of "submit a help ticket through the widget" means the JSM Portal UI?  

If so, you can just update the Customer Permissions for your "internal IT service project" to lock out your external customers

So, you just need to control access who can access your internal IT JSM project (customers who can create tickets via the portal.

If not, what is your widget that you are referring?

Hope this helps.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Infrastructure Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

[aaronmoreng]

Hi @Joseph Chung Yin 

I am referring to the configurable widget located provided by the JSM for the channel: 

Then we embedded the widget on our site. Customers on our site will be able to submit tickets to us via that embedded widget. However when the user gets their reply email with a link to the external ticket portal, it gives them the option to go back to the "help center" which lists both the internal ITSM project and the customer service project.

For this particular project, I only want them to be able to view the project that they should have access to which in this example is the "Order Portal Support" project, not the ITSM project. Hopefully I'm articulating that correctly. 

So if I am understanding you correctly, you're saying that I should change the permissions on my internal ITSM project to limit to only customers added by agents, correct? I am not sure this is a good fit either, because we want our employees to be able to send tickets via email to the email channel whether it's on their personal email or their corporate email. I am certainly willing to explore that path if it's the only way though. 

[Joseph Chung Yin]

@aaronmoreng -

The option I recommended would essentially locked down access/discovery of your IT Internal project to the specified set of users (i.e. your employee). On the question of your employees can create issues via email (both personal email/corporate email address), I will need to research it further. 

My question to you will be that if one internal employee using his/her corp email to create issues via email, the corp email address is already associated with his/her account.  However, if they use their personal email, then it is my understanding that another customer account will be created.  How are you currently handle this case and sync up the account to the same person?

Best, Joseph

[aaronmoreng]

Thank you, that sounds like a reasonable approach. We only have 30 employees to manage so it's probably a non-issue to just lock down the internal project to specific domain addresses. I was intending to have the email channel be available in case their corporate email was unavailable (i.e. locked out of their account, they could send a service request from their personal email), but that might be solving a problem I just created.

I would be very interested if there is a way to limit project access to specific groups however. This seems like it would be a better fit for limiting portal access than a project level setting? I'm new to this and appreciate the dialog! 

[Joseph Chung Yin]

@aaronmoreng -

Yes, you can create internal group(s) in JSM and manage those groups.  Once groups are created, then you can use it and assign "Service Desk Customers" role for your JSM project.

If my recommendation helped, please click on "Accept Answer" when you have a chance.

Best, Joseph

[Julie Bennett]

we are looking to implement something similar in our organisation.

Currently our clients have visibility of all calls they have logged via the portal (Order Portal Support).

We regularly will have the situation where the call logged by the client is then reassigned to an internal JSM project (IT Service Management).

If the call is reassigned to an internal project, what will the client continue to see on the portal? 

Do we need to reassign and then close the external call?

[Joseph Chung Yin]

@Julie Bennett -

If the internal JSM project is not visible to the customers, then the issues created in the internal project will not be available for the customers to see via the portal UI.  

The customers will only see the issues that he/she originally reported.  What you may want to do is to create automation rules (using Automation for Jira) to setup a process where the internal JSM project's issues are closed, then automatically close out the original issues.

This will required that you (agents) to setup proper issue links between the original issue reported by the customers with the issues created in your internal JSM project.  I am assuming that when you stated "reassignment" in your question means an issue is created in your internal JSM project.

Hope this helps.

Best, Joseph