Service Desk new users signing up consume a seat on the license

[Ali Buhisi]

We have a service desk portal to assist external customers by tracking and logging issues but when a few of them had attempted to gain access to our portals + Knowledge Base, us agents receive an email indicating that the new user has joined our project and is now consuming a seat on our license. This issue has occurred several times now with 2-3 different users. 

Please let me know the cause of this issue as well as the steps to take so this issue does not present itself again. 

[Tom · Accepted solution]

By the sounds of it, your site is allowing automatic registering of Users, which does eat a license, instead of letting them register as Customers only. 

FYI, if a customer wants direct access to your KB in Confluence they will need a user license. However, if they access the KB page thru your Service Desk Portal, it does not.

The only exception to this is if you've made the particular Confluence Space accessible Anonymously. Just keep in mind this makes it accessible by everyone on the Internet as long as they know the URL of the space.

Hope this helps.

[Ali Buhisi]

Hi Tom, yup that sounds about right. 

Do you have guidance on how to change the configuration to not have them automatically registered? Thank you, this clarifies a lot! 

[Tom]

How to Configure your Service Desk Settings (Global & then Project)

Because there are so many options and combinations of options, this created a lot of confusion for us and our customers. In the end we created a page on our customer's sites. Here's the boiled down info w/o screen captures. And these are the settings when using Cloud. Server version has the same capabilities but via different wording/screens.

NOTE: The different configurations even change the log in screen options at your Help Center, so it helps to play with different settings and see what you get when wearing the "customer hat".

The Takeaway: Your Jira/System Admins set the Global permissions which prohibit or delegate choices and their permissions down to the Project admins.

OPTION 1: Default - Only the project teams can create accounts

• In Global Settings
  • Can customers create their own accounts? NO
• In each project these are the possible settings:
  Who can access the portal and send requests?
  
  • Customers my team adds manually to the project
  • Anyone with a user (license) account on mysite

The Result:  Only known users, by customer invite or existing internal Jira licensed users have access.

OPTION 2: Customers can sign up for their own accounts but anonymous access to All portals is prohibited.

• In Global Settings
  • Can customers create their own accounts? YES
    Which makes the next question viewable
  • Can customers access and send requests without logging in?
    If you choose NO then,
• In each project these are the possible settings:
  • Who can access the portal and send requests?
    • Customers my team adds to the project
      or
    • Anyone can send a request via the portal or by sending an email to the portal

The Result: Only customer accounts (by invite) are possible. 

OPTION 3: Anonymous access is allowed if the project team permits it

• In Global Settings
  • Can customers create their own accounts? YES
  • Can customers access and send requests w/o logging in? YES
• Then...In each project these are the possible settings:
  • Who can access the portal and send requests?
    • Customers my team adds to the project
      or
    • Anyone can send a request without logging in
      If you choose this, more possibilities come into play, like...
      • Who can customers share requests with 
        and
      • The KB space permissions will get changed.

The Result: Anyone can get straight to the portal as long as the project team permits and your KB space permissions could get change to anonymous.

[Yogesh Mude]

HI @Ali Buhisi,

please go through the below articles...

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/setting-up-service-desk-users-732528877.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedesk025/jira-service-desk-licensing-754977562.html