Want JIRA Service Desk new user default to Customer Portal

[Jacki Keys]

We have a nonprofit license for Atlassian products. As an administrator, I've set up JIRA, Confluence and JIRA Service Desk. We currently have all our support going to one person's email (we are small). What we want is to redirect the people who email for support to JIRA Service Desk. They are all external to our company. I'd like this to be as seamless for the end user as possible as well as keep administration overhead to a minimum.

1. Want to direct the user to a link to our Service Desk Customer Portal. If they do not have an account (as none of them will initially), they should be directed to a link to create their JIRA account instead (instead of being prompted to contact a JIRA administrator for this.
2. Once they create their account and log in for the first time, I want them to be restricted to only see the Customer Portal by default.
3. As admins, we can manually grant access as needed later, but no new account should have permission to view anything besides the Customer Portal by default.

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

What if you by default all the projects in JIRA and limit them to jira-users group only? That ways people who login to service desk can access JIRA url but will not see any project.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Many of our clients request something similar to what you're asking for in the first part of item #1 and item #2. Jira/Jira Service Desk don't natively have any way of limiting the access to the traditional Jira interface based on user. We came up with a tricky way of accomplishing it, though. You'll see that there is a specific URL that is used when you open an issue in Service Desk. We set up an apache proxy server and use mod_rewrite rule to redirect Service Desk users to the Jira Service Desk url while users expecting the traditional Jira interface connect to that interface. I'd have to check the behavior when you allow users to create accounts, but I believe that will send them to the traditional Jira interface once they have created their account. They would need to return to Service Desk in order to get back to being locked into that UI. The permissions are pretty easy to do. You simply create a permission scheme that grants the permissions you need on the Service Desk project, and add the Service Desk only users to the permissions that they need and don't add them to any other projects. That will make all other projects invisible to them.

[Jacki Keys]

Sorry for leaving this open for so long after you posted your answer, Dave. I needed to run it by my developer before responding. We're having a hard time understanding what action to take.

Sounds like you're saying that there's no way to get the desired behavior just through JIRA settings:

1. new user comes to site and hasn't created a new account yet
2. they get a link to create an account
3. create the account
4. log in to that account for the first time
5. are directed to the Customer Service Portal rather than JIRA's traditional issue interface

I'm still pretty new to JIRA and all these configuration possibilities.

[Jacki Keys]

At this point, our dev got the URL for the Customer Portal that will take them to directly to the Customer Portal if they're already authenticated, but if they're not, they'll have a link to create a new account.

That works fine. It creates their JIRA account, and I set it up so new accounts default to a user group that only has permission to see the Service Desk Customer Portal.

The problem that remains is getting them there.

They receive an account creation email that gives them the link to JIRA rather than the Customer Portal.

I've been working with the Velocity templates and trying to edit the link so that instead of (what's presumably) ${baseurl} being built into the email, it's the URL I have from our developer.

I edited the usercreated-nopassword.vm template, which appears to be what gets sent when somebody creates a new account. I also edited the usercreated.vm, and had our dev restart JIRA for the template changes to take effect, but nothing changed.

Any other thoughts or ideas? Without this working, we can't direct end users to our Service Desk.