Why use Services over Components when "Affected Services" cannot be set by Customer?

[Josh Martin]

We are new to Jira Service Management.  I was very excited to see we could list out all of our Services and define their tier in our organization.  Even better, we can define their dependencies, which is great!

When we created all of our Request Types, we set up the Customer Form to display the "Affected Services" field so the customer could specify what service they're reporting an issue on.

Unfortunately, we found out the hard way that the "Affected Services" field is inaccessible by Customers. It is an Agent only field;  If the field is present and you mark it required, the customer will not be able to submit their request and no error message is displayed.

We have now listed all of our Services as Components and we're swapped out the "Affected Services" field with the "Components" field.

So, why would I want to use "Services" over "Components" when "Affected Services" cannot be set by the Customer?

[Caroline Bartle · Accepted solution]

Hi Josh - The Affected Services field isn't agent-only, and should allow your customers to select a service (whether it's set to mandatory or not) when the field is included in your request forms.

Are you able to provide a bit more info on the errors you're encountering? 

[Ross McCardal]

We are also not seeing the affected services filed appear for customers. Only Agents have visibility via the portal when creating or editing an issue.

[edit]

From the Atlassian Support pages...

[Josh Martin]

@Caroline Bartle Exactly what @Ross McCardal said.  Atlassian has purposefully made the Affected Services field only available to those who are licensed for Jira. There's no errors at all, it's just that it doesn't show up.  If you mark it as Required, it will not let the support request submit and error messages are not present either which just confuse our customers.

We've worked around this by not utilizing Services.  We created a Component for each Service and we're using the Components field instead now.  I would love to have some of the extended functionality of Services, though.

[Caroline Bartle]

Thank you @Ross McCardal and @Josh Martin for your responses.

I've been looking into this further - I believe that the documentation page shared is inaccurate (we'll have it updated). Portal users don't have to be licensed for Jira to see the Affected Services field, however they do have to have an Atlassian Account to see it. A portal-only customer account will not be able to view/edit the field. 

Does this help? Could your portal customers be migrated to Atlassian accounts, or are there blockers to doing this?

[Josh Martin]

@Caroline Bartle Adding a customer from my Service Management Project is not enough and they have to set up an Atlassian account in addition to being added as a customer?  If I am understanding you correctly, is the proper onboarding process to create their account via Atlassian Admin > User Management > Users > Invite Users and do not give them any site access.  Once that is complete, I would add them as a customer to my service management project?

[Josh Martin]

@Caroline Bartle I hope you are having wonderful holidays! Did you see my previous response? I'm trying to understand the proper workflow, but I think I'm just confusing myself more.

[Caroline Bartle]

Hi @Josh Martin, sorry for the delayed response. You can migrate existing JSM portal-only customers to Atlassian Account via Atlassian Admin > User Management > Jira Service Management, and then clicking "Migrate to Atlassian Account" on the triple dot menu of a user. 

There's a bit more info about portal-only customers and Atlassian Accounts here: https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/manage-jira-service-management-customer-accounts

[Ákos Botos]

@Caroline Bartle

Does this approach lead to the increase of users on the operator of the JSM site and consequently to extra charges?

[Joshua Elcik]

The fact that Atlassian thought it would be a good idea to make Services only viewable by licensed jira users is just odd, who thought this was a good idea? 

[Joshua Selser]

I am hard pressed to find any good reason for this design requirement -- but that doesn't mean there aren't any.  

So Atlassian JSM team, what is the reasoning behind this?  It might help us be able to manage our projects better if we understand the why behind the what... 

[Hamzah Mohamed]

The only reason I can think of is security. A potential intruder can use a service desk to find out what programs or services a company has so that they can attack just those services.

[Paul Reynolds]

Run into exactly the same problem as everyone else here. Thought it made sense to use "affected services" on the portal forms but then realised the customers cant see the field.

Doesn't make much sense to me. 

@Josh Martin did you migrate the users? I worry this will just add confusion for the customers

[Joshua Elcik]

No, we have to many customers to turn into licensed accounts, I just stopped using Affected services and created a custom field.