Looking for suggestions about Allowing external partners access.

[Josh Barnes]

Good afternoon Atlassian Community,

    I am a new Jira Admin for my current employer.  We currently work with multiple external partners and we use Jira to track the issues that arise. Currently I have to access each external partner's instance of Jira and them manually copy and paste their issues from their Jira Software tracker to ours. I am looking to build out an instance where I can give access to our external partners to one central instance of Jira whether it is just a single project for all our partners to log their issues. 

   The thing is I am looking to set it so that each external partner has their own group that they can only interact and add with their issues.  I am trying to find the best way about completing this task I know this is a complex question. I am just stuck on what would be the best course whether it would be project roles or security groups.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.

[Esther Strom · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Josh Barnes - you're right; this is complex, since you want to keep your partners' data secure. 

In general, best practice if you're going to go with a single instance is to create a security group for each customer, then set your project roles using the groups. So if you use a single permissions scheme, you want to make sure that none of the project or issue-related permissions are set to all logged-in users, but rather to a user role. You'd then assign the correct security group to that role in each project to make sure that each partner can only access the projects and issues they should be able to view.

However, the meta info at the top right indicates that you're on the free plan, which has less robust permission options than the paid plans do. I really wouldn't recommend trying to keep all of your partners' data in a single free instance; there's just no way to secure it. The only way to manage is to either upgrade to a paid plan or keep your instances separate so that each partner can only access their own instance.

[Trudy Claspill]

@Esther Strom 

Also note that he said he wants all the vendors to access just one project. He wants each vendor to have access to only a subset of issues within a single, shared project.

I provided a response on this topic in his previous post:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Creating-a-bug-tracker-for-multiple-external-partners/qaq-p/1675012