Customer is not able to add comments to project (Jira service management) as field is not visible!

[Maria Stancheva]

Hello, 

For some projects, although all permissions are set up correctly and workflow stages are made visible to customer, they are not able to add comments or view workflow, if added as service desk customers or group. 

Comment field becomes visible on the old view, but not on the new one. Workflow cannot be made visible. We would like to add conditions to the workflow but we are struggling to make this visible at all to the customers (either added as service desk customer or a group). 

lease advise!

Thank you, 

Maria

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Customers can comment on issues either from the portal or via email by responding to the Jira notification associated with a particular issue. Your post seems to be referring to the application side interface that is only available to licensed users. Please clarify.

[Maria Stancheva]

Hello, 

Thank you for response. I mean that customers have been given access to their project on the Jira service management as they were not able to view and comments on tickets on the portal  that they are not the requestors for. 

So now they are able to see also internal comments and add comments on the project. However, the latter is not currently accessible for some projects. 

Is this clearer?

[Jack Brickey]

It sounds like your “customers“ are actually licensed users such as JSW. Is that the case? Otherwise without a license a user cannot login to the Jira instance.

Ultimately what is your goal? Do you want these customers to have access to the issues only via the portal and email? If so make sure that your internal customers do not have browse permissions to the project. Further if you want users to be able to comment on issues reported by others then you need to incorporate organization feature and group your customers within an organization which will allow users to share their issues with other users in their organization.

[Maria Stancheva]

Yes, they are licensed users. They would like to be able to view all tickets and comment on those, no matter if those are shared with them or not. So, we have granted them access to browse the project as portal is limiting this functionality. 

May you please advise how they can add comments on the project? We would like to keep their access as service desk customers (either on ind level or group level). 

Thank you!

[Jack Brickey]

So if you give them browse permissions then they will be able to see all comments both internal and public. There is no way to get around that. What you have in effect done is to make your customers what I referred to as collaborators. This basically makes them non-customers at least in the JSM definition. There is really no reason to have them listed as customers and give them browse permissions. In this implementation you could just as easily used your software and not deal with your Jira service management at all.

[Maria Stancheva]

Hello, 

Thank you for the clarification! So, it means that their access will be similar to the collaborators one? What would be the difference if they are added to browse the project, I support it is based on the permission fields. 

What is also the difference between Jira software and service mgmt? 

One more question - if we would like to restrict customers to view only workflow and have access to certain transitions (waiting for customer-> work in progress), how we may used the conditions fields? I have tried to use all possible options but customer are not able to see workflow when added only as customers and not collaborators. We would like also to ensure that collaborators and customer have different access to the workflow steps. 

Thank you for your support!

[Daniel Ebers]

Jira Software is a product mainly focused on Software Development tasks where Jira Service Management has a very nice feature of providing a customer portal - also a highlight is that customers (users who are 'just' raising requests) are not billed.

You can see the differences in a easy to understand table:

The right features for your team
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/family

I understood it in a way to are using Jira Software management and enable users to use it - without the feature of the customer portal which is, again, brought in by Jira Service Management.

Doing the current way the permissions are defined by Permission Schemes.

For the bottom part of your questions you could restrict customers (based on a group or a role in your project) to not being able execute some transitions.

You can learn more about it here:

Configure advanced issue workflows
https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-advanced-issue-workflows/

When you say the customers are not able to see the workflows it would be needed to revise the permission for them on the project. For example, there is a separate permission to look into the workflow - unsure, though if it is what you meant.

"Different access to workflow" steps, if I understood you right, on the other hand corresponds to what I said earlier for Workflow conditions/validators.

Re-reading your latest statements I believe a few things get mixed up.

Assuming the project is a Service Management project and it should like it is and customers should work in it like they would be internal staff - in other words: agents.
Then they must be assigned a Service Management license. Using the (former called) 'collaborator' feature will not enable them to use all functionality a Service Management project provided.

An alternative would be to create (and then move existing issues) to a Jira Software project. However, in this scenario all features of Jira Service Management would go away.

What is not possible is to let Jira Software users (no matter if they are a 'power user' with customer which should not use the portal or not) use Jira Service Management will all of its bells and whistles - as earlier stated a Service Management license assigned to them would be needed.

Regardless on how you want to process you can still use Conditions and Validators on a workflow.