Make external user/email a change approver

[Justin Westover]

I need to make an external user a change approver. Can I do this without burning a license? The user only needs the ability to approve a change request. I'm trying to stay within the free tier of licensing and I already have 3 agents. One more agent sends me into the paid tier. Thoughts? 

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Yes you can leverage unlicensed customer accounts to be approvers within Jira Service Management.  However to do this, it has a few requirements to make it work.

1. Allow customers to choose approvers - has some basic setup steps that need to be followed for this to work. There are also references to portal settings such as allowing customers to search for other customers, that might have be enabled to help make this work
2. The workflow of the request also has be in adjusted to make this work.  For a typical Service Change request, the default workflow is not setup to restrict the steps awaiting an approval.  Whereas the Service Request with Approvals has a default workflow that is configured to await approval before the request can be moved to a new status.

It might be possible to edit that workflow to correct for this.  But instead I'd recommend creating a new request type in cases like this. When you do this in the project settings, there is an option to "Use workflow and fields from this issue type", Choose Service Requests with approvals here.  This is a quick way to get the workflow needed to make the approvals work as expected.  Otherwise the approval aspects won't function within the customer portal and the request itself won't be restricted pending an approval.

I hope this helps.

Andy

[Jack Brickey]

Yes they simply need to be listed as a customer. Here is an article of interest- add-an-approval-to-a-workflow 

[Justin Westover]

I see where I can add custom approvers for a request but I'm trying to do this for a change request. I followed the article you sent over. I went under "request types" and then choose "Changes". I then selected my change and went to "Request Form" and then tried to add a custom field called "Approvers"; however, the only option here is "Approvals Group" and those groups only allow me to choose people with licenses. Thoughts?