Is it possible to create a user that does not count down to the license?

[Simon Dahlberg]

We have only a 10 user licence. I would like my customers to be able to report issues, but i dont want them to count down my license. Is that possible?

[Wojciech Seliga · Accepted solution]

Some people integrate JIRA with e-mail based issue reporting. JIRA scans periodically an e-mail box using POP3 or IMAP and then creates an issue putting the original sender e-mail into a custom field. Then "reporter" field does not matter (it's for example set to "mail deamon" user).

Then just your employees can work on such issues. And only then count as active users.

Then on every comment/change (depending on how you configure notification scheme in JIRA) JIRA notifies the original reporters (using this custom-field as a recipient) about the change/resolution/comment. Then they reply to such e-mail and that could be put back as a comment by JIRA mail handler. So you have full e-mail round-trip here.

You can normally use search to filter issues per real reporter - just using this custom field and not the regular reporter field. In fact the original reporters won't even have corresponding users in JIRA.

Although such setup could look lame it has several advanages:

• it fully decouples JIRA from end-users. For some companies it really matters. E.g. they want JIRA to be used solely as a back-end / back-office system. They want users to use the most ubiqutous way of communication: e-mails or maybe a simple web form which ends up as an e-mail in JIRA
• it allows you to build simple web form (gateway) into your JIRA. Users don't bother which system you really use. They don't need to sign up, etc.
• it alleviates several performance problems you may cope with when dealing with huge number of users registered in your jIRA. I've personally provided consulting services to a company which has millions of unique users potentially reporting problems, bug only a dozen or so users actually actively using JIRA as their back-office system. That setup allows to scale JIRA to many hundred thousand issues (up to a million or even two).
• lastely it allows you to save some bucks on licenses, but honestly that's definitely the least meaningful reason.

[Simon Dahlberg]

How do i use a custom field as a receipent?

[Wojciech Seliga]

JIRA OOB allows you to configure your notification scheme so that notifications are sent to User Custom Field Value and Group Custom Field Value (among many other less interesting here). So if you follow the path that you create the account for every user, but you deactive them, it;s enough.

However if you decide not to create user accounts at all for such external users/reporters then you would need to extend JIRA so that it can send out e-mail notification to an e-mail address defined as a text (not corresponding to any account). Probably the easiest thing is implement it as IssueListener (triggered on every change) as mail notification engine is not really pluggable (this is what we did for one of our customers). At the moment I cannot see any plugin published on plugins.atlassian.com which does something like that.

[Mark Nixon]

Have anonomous access to the issue reporting mechanisim , and make sure you have it protected with a CAPTCHA or similar. Anonomous users don't count towards your license, but also the challenge you will have is managing, replying to, and properly capturing the responses......