Can Service Desk be removed from Jira and Confluence

[Brett Hill]

We currently use JIRA and Confluence in our dev ops.  I would like to do an extensive evaluation of Service Desk integrated with our cloud instance of JIRA and Confluence.  I really have two questions.

1. If, at the end of my test, I decide not to use Service Desk can it be removed from our instance of JIRA and Confluence without causing problems?
2. What impact does adding Service Deck have on the existing JIRA and Confluence instance when Service Desk is added? 

I don't want to risk impacting our Development and Engineering for my testing.

Thank you- Brett Hill

[Amanda {Praecipio} · Accepted solution]

Brett: Since JIRA Service Desk (JSD) is an add-on, it behaves like other add-ons from a system configuration standpoint. TL;DR you can easily disable service desks associated to projects and disable the add-on.

Once JSD is installed, it adds some issue types that will not be available when disabling the add-on (can't remember what they are off the top of my head). Any additional configuration you make to JIRA such as adding custom fields to show/hide in request types, issue types, workflows, screens, etc. will be retained in the instance. Using the Enable Service Desk option in the Project Administration menu will attach a basic desk to the project and create schemes in the back end of JIRA, but will not migrate any of the existing schemes out of the project. Permission Schemes, specifically, would be migrated from the JSD interface.

Items typically added include Permission Schemes, Issue Type Schemes, and 3 project Roles (Collaborators, Service Desk Customers, and Service Desk Team).

However, creating a Service Desk Project from the Create Project Menu will automatically create schemes and associate them with the JIRA Project. Disabling the service desks or the Add-on will not remove these items. If, after evaluating JSD you decide it isn't worth it, you will have to delete the schemes manually.

With the email request option, I can't tell you if it retains the mail handler configuration for service desk. It may retain, but disable; in which case, you will have to delete the mail handler.

For Confluence, any How-to articles or Troubleshooting articles created in Confluence from JIRA will be retained in your Confluence instance (you connect one space to each service desk). You can disable the connection to the Knowledge Base without any impact to Confluence. If you've created a space to connect to, the space will be retained in Confluence. Content will have to be migrated to another space or deleted if you truly want it to go away.

Hope that helps! Thanks! -a