Read Only access for non service desk agents

[Lucas Kattis]

I have read various articles but it is still not clear to me.

Is there any way to provide read access to non service desk agents in service desk?

I.e. I can mention someone in comments but since they do not have a service desk agent license they cannot even read the issue.

Thanks,

Lucas

[Tansu Akdeniz · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lucas Kattis ,

Collaborators can access service desk issues and take some actions (add attachment, comment, vote etc) without consuming an agent license.

Please check this kb.

*Also, take a look at this service desk roles page.

Regards

[Lucas Kattis]

Thanks for the reply. I apologize but I forgot to mention that we are using the Cloud version and I cannot seem to find Collaborators anywhere.

Is there a way to give read permission to Jira users in the cloud platform?

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lucas Kattis

You can provide Collaborators access to the users by just adding the non-service desk agents to Service desk Team role in the project.

Collaborators are not an official role, but you can bring in non-agents with an existing Jira license (i.e. Jira Software or Jira Core) to work internally with agents in Jira Service Desk projects because of the strong integration between Jira products. Simply add them to the Service Desk Team role in a project, and they can view issues, be @mentioned, and make internal comments without consuming an agent license.

Read more about collaborators and our best practice guide on collaborating with other Jira teams on Jira Service Desk issues. Jira Service Desk agents and Jira Software developers can be granted permissions cross-project as outlined on these same pages:

• Discovering Jira applications with Jira Cloud
• Jira applications and project types overview with Jira Server

If you aim to have users that do not need to be assigned Jira Service Desk issues, transition Jira Service Desk issues, or respond to customers, it would be cheaper to license these users for Jira Core or a Jira Software license to collaborate internally with Jira Service Desk agents. 

Regards,

Vijay Ramamurthy

[Kevin Black]

I am not sure if I should reply here or start a new issue. I'll try here first.

Initial comment (personal): The permissions system in JIRA and associated products is a real mess, it's confusing and the documentation is often out of date. It would be my biggest complaint by a country mile. RANT mode off

I'm using TM4J a test add on for JIRA/Service Desk. I have a three agent service desk. Testers DO NOT need to be agents (in reality nor should they be). TM4J allows testers to add issues, when executing a test case, if a defect is found. The issues SHOULD go into a service desk project. Note that the Testers have site access (JIRA Software, Confluence).

The first thing the tester does is search the service desk to see if any defects already exist for the one identified. BUT because the tester is not an agent NO ISSUES SHOW UP. Yes, I've seen the above comments. The help about collaborators is simply wrong for a cloud instance, there is NO collaborators tab.

But I persevered and set the tester up with a role of Jira Service Desk Team. This proved somewhat useless. The tester could not see (as before) any of the issues in the service desk and it added that tester user as a user of Service Desk, which would update our license count and we would get billed $100/month instead of $10/month (to a small struggling company that's a lot). 

Testers can create and edit issues via the portal (cumbersome, but workable), but the whole testing regime falls flat on its face if the testers cannot search to see if the issue has already been reported and, the issue (either if it exists or has been created) cannot be associated/linked with the test case.

So my question is simple: How do I setup a user so that the user has read-only access to a service desk project without increasing the Service Desk agent count?

[Sumukha]

Hello @Kevin Black , did you perhaps find a solution to this problem? I am trying to set up some users with read-only access but not sure how. 

[Kevin Black]

@Sumukha Unfortunately no. Everything I tried that was useful added to my service desk user licenses. This defeats the purpose of having testers who simply need to know whether an issue about the defect found already exists. It is totally counter productive - of course all testers CANNOT be service desk agents yet that’s the only way it works. We use X-RAY and it makes testing with JIRA service desk ridiculously complex. Again rant mode off.

kevin

[Sumukha]

@Kevin Black Thank you for your reply. We just created a new role (one should have Jira admin access to create a new role) called it "Collaborator" and gave the read-only permissions to this role. We added users under this role and it works for us. Maybe you should give this a try :)

We also use cloud-version of JSD and the collaborator role was not readily available.

[Colin McCririck]

Totally agree.  The permission/security is broken and so hard to follow.  We are on cloud version as well.  I tried to solve this problem with Groups and that doesn't work.  That seems to be the menu item they show in most places in cloud version.  Roles is hidden deeper and uses the permission schemes that are super complex and different to how the new project access seems to work.  Atlassian please fix this.

[Colin McCririck]

I tried adding a separate role to the permission scheme and gave it create/edit/delete comment access but this doesn't work either.   @Sumukha how did you give read-only access without incurring the service desk licence?

[Colin McCririck]

Found the extra step - have to go into the project and add people with that role specifically.  The role/group do not do anything unless you add people in the 

project -> settings -> people -> add people (button) and select individuals and the role that has the access.

seems doing it on mass via a role/groups doesn't work.

[Miles Jordan]

Here's what worked for me. In my case I wanted everyone in my company with an Atlassian license to be able to browse the project and see all JSM tickets without needing an agent license. I just went to Project Settings -> Permissions -> Edit Permissions and added the "users" group to Browse Projects.