External use of Jira

GilK
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July 28, 2012

Hi,

We have Jira + GH + confluence + tempo on premise installation.

We use Jira internally for tracking bugs, managing tasks (requirements, stories, etc.), knowledge base and managing releases (to QA, integration and customer).

We're thinking of opening our Jira for external use by our customers and partners.

What would be the best way of doing it?

How do you do it?

What is the relation between the external content and the internal content (i.e. when a customer reports a bug, how it interface with the internal system?).

Thanks,

Janiv Ratson.

2 answers

2 votes
SimonS
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July 30, 2012

Hi janiv,

There are a couple ways you could do this. One is to grab an unlimited-user license for JIRA and then open-up JIRA to public signups:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Enabling+Public+Signup+and+CAPTCHA

Then your customers and partners could sign up for their own account, submit bugs, etc.

You can also partition JIRA so that user groups do not see projects or issues not related to them:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAKB/How+To+Partition+JIRA+for+Different+Isolated+User+Groups

Alternatively, if you don't want to purchase an unlimited-user license, you could open up your JIRA instance to anonymous access:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Allowing+users+to+create+issues+anonymously

You can restrict which issues/projects these users can see, just like any other user group.

At Atlassian, we have public projects for each of our products and internal private projects also. When a user reports a bug in the public project and we verify it, we clone it to the development project and track it there. Both issues are resolved when we release a new version.

-Simon

GilK
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October 14, 2012

Thanks for the great answer.

The only relevant option for me is partitioning.

Currently we have about 5-10 operative customers.

I also have another option: establish another instance of jira (up to 10 users) on external server.

I'll manager the accounts. My customer will then report issues via this external jira.

Our customer support people will "listen" on this jira instance, and whatever is relevant, they will "move" to our internal jira instance.

Which of the two options is better?

Thanks,

Janiv.

Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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October 14, 2012

Two JIRA's is twice the admin, cost ongoing etc. Flipside, one JIRA is 'ok' for data partitioning, but you have to manage your security carefully, for example making 'jira-users' an 'access' role rather than having anything to do with project security. Do that and #2 wins IMO. If you are not so much concerned about cost and more concerned about isolation, #1 would win.

GilK
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October 14, 2012

The main concern is that the only jira instance resides on the DMZ with all our company crucial information.

Having two jira instances, I leave only the external instance, with only the customers information some exposed to the public, whereas our internal instance resides behind our great firewalls.

What do you think?

Thanks,

janiv

Andy Brook [Plugin People]
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October 14, 2012

Hi Janiv,

As I said, if you're more concerned about data safety/integrity that cost, in your instance another JIRA would work well. It's nice to be able to give users direct JIRA access where possible, failing that you could use an email only approach, allow create/comment by email, it really depends on what your support model is.

0 votes
Olaf Brenn December 17, 2014

Hi there, so if we do not want to install twice (internal and external) the only way would be to let clients access the internal area via secure SSL tunnel. Even in case we use the anonymous way we have to let external  users access the internal installation? Right?

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