Restrict portal access for competitors

[Deleted user]

Hey all,

We recently started using JSD. After the first week, one big issue arose:

We want to allow users to be able to send requests via mail and we want users to be able to read our knowledge-base articles via the customer portal.

We do not want competitors to access our portal so they know how our software works.

I tried restricting the portal access to customers our agents add specifically to the project but that only results in our users not being able to send requests via mail anymore.

Additionally, I set the action "create issues" to public.

-> The result was the same.

Is there any way to handle what I need?

Thanks a lot in advance

Kind regards,

Dominik

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi Dominik, welcome to the Community!

setting the permissions to “customers our agent add” does not prevent email creation, but it does prevent non-customers from using email or portal. If you leave the customer permissions as open then the portal is public. Now a competitor or any random person could stumble upon the portal URL and the could certainly create a new issue but they would not be allowed to see other’s issues. In that mode, your agents would need to remove auto-created users that were unwanted which is a lot of house keeping. I generally opt for only allowing customers created by agents if possible.

[Deleted user]

Hi Jack, thanks for the welcome and for the super fast response!

Only allowing customers created by agents is indeed my first choice, but we need to make sure that non-customers can still send emails to us.

Our customer base is quite "special", some of the customers we invited don't even want to create an account and I know that some older folk would be quite overwhelmed. We are in the cinema business and there are a lot of hardcore cinema people who "have done things always the same".

Is there absolutely no way?

[Jack Brickey]

Having "Customers my team adds to the project" as the customer permission for accessing the portal will not prevent any user (that know the email address) from sending in an email. However, it will direct JSD not to process the email if the from email is not in the customer list. What you could do is have your agents monitor the email logs for any failed emails due to non-customer reason and then use the "Raise a request" function in the sidebar to manually create the issue for the user. When you enter their email in the "on behalf of" field it will add them as a customer and, depending on the notifications you have set up, will notify them that the ticket was created.