How to restrict public access to customers only?

[FrankTrautwein]

We would like to invite our customers to suggest features, allow to vote and track progress. However, adding each customer to Jira and counting against the licensed Jira users is prohibitive due to the related cost.

One option would be to allow anonymous access, but this results, according to other posts, in spam. Due to security vulnerabilities, we would like to remain with our internal Jira instance on premises and not open it up for anonymous access.

I was thinking of setting up a separate cloud instance for anonymous access, and synchronizing issues reported by our customers with our Jira Server instance through one of the existing plug-ins. But we still would need to 1) resolve restricting access to our customers only, and 2) track who of the customers added which issue. We mainly have a web-based application that requires login, so providing an individual URL per customer or a REST-based token or an oAuth2-based authentication would be easy. But I don't see how this could be handled on the Jira Cloud instance with public access. Anyone have an idea on how to go about this?

Thanks, Frank

[Mario Abud]

@FrankTrautwein you didn't see the possibility of using Jira Service Desk?

[FrankTrautwein]

Thanks Mario!

We actually had Service Desk installed for a while. I don't recall all the details why we decided against it - not being able to vote for features and the requirement of customers having to create yet another account were two major show stoppers for us. That was ~2 years ago, but it looks like it's pretty much unchanged (e.g. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-1743). In the age of Slack and MS Teams, Service Desk starts to look a bit outdated IMHO. Thanks for the suggestion though!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Customers don't have to create new accounts, an existing Jira account can be used.

I understand the voting point, but service desk is not the place to vote for features, it's where you do support.  Voting for features is a development project thing, not a help desk function.

[Mario Abud]

There is a plugin on the marketplace that can help you with voting for features "Customer Feedback & Roadmap Portal"

Regards

[FrankTrautwein]

Thanks Nic and Mario. Our customers typically don't have a Jira account, so they need to register with JSD (I guess emailing an initial request would work without, but if I recall correctly, as soon as a customer wants to update a ticket through the web interface, he'd need to register in JSD). It's easy enough, I know, but for the customers having to maintain two credentials (one for our web application, one for support ticketing) is not acceptable. We should have a mechanism to sign-up and authenticate customers for JSD based on the credentials they have with our application. But I guess that is not available?

The customer feedback plug-in, albeit brand new, seems interesting, thanks for that hint!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

So it sounds like you should get Jira and your web application to use a shared user directory.  Then people would only need one account to log into both. 

Jira supports a range of external user directories already, but for Cloud, you'll need to use Google accounts or Atlassian Access.