JIRA Service Desk - Permissions / Portal / Project and Search

[Nikora Terrill]

Hi All,

I am setting up a portal where our customers are all external.

Due to privacy laws and contractual agreements, they should not be able to view requests outside of their own company, but also have multiple people within their organisation who need to be able to view each others work.

While I like the portal, it is very limited in its abilities and its customization.
the fact a customer cannot search using the search function and entering a ticket number has to be one of the most insane things I have ever come across in a Service Desk tool.

Anyway, I thought, why not give the users access to the project so they can use dashboards and add another layer of security around the issues but this gives them access to view "internal comments".

you cannot manage this another way, which is ridiculously annoying. It was far easier without Service Desk when you could limit the access to a comment based on Group etc. 

Service Desk and JIRA seem to combat each other which makes for one of the most frustrating experiences in setting something up I have ever come across. 

I am at a loss now how to do this, has anyone, can anyone, provide a solution/suggestion?

[Nikora Terrill]

Thanks for the response Nicholas, it certainly gives us a valid option.
My only concern is around the fact the customers already use our older version of JIRA without the Service Desk plugin which gives them so many more options and their own accounts. The idea was to make it as seamless as possible for them so they experience little to no change, we all know how most people are about change.

I will test it anyway and see how it goes.

One thing I have found with this tool is nothing is ever seamless.

[Nicolas Bourdages]

We've had similar challenges at my company. We had a single JIRA project in which we wanted requests from several of our clients to end up. Here's what we did:

• We got JEMH. It's a plugin that allows issue reporting and commenting by email to non-JIRA users
• We created a Security Scheme and configured security levels as such:
  • Level A, accessible to users in group A (as well as all developers at my company)
  • Level B, accessible to users in group B (as well as all developers at my company)
  • Level C, only accessible to users in my company
• We set up JEMH profiles so that emails sent from client A email domain to a support email address reported issues with Level A security, and the same for client B. Level C is the default level when issues ares created from within JIRA.
• We gave each company a limited number of JIRA users, with which they could log and view issues from their own security level, but didn't give those users reporting rights, only edition / comments rights. They have to use email to report.

In a nutshell, this solution allows us to have issues from multiple clients in the same project, all issues secure from users who shouldn't see them. All users from the client companies can report and comment on issues by email, but only a select few can actually log into JIRA.

As for "Internal comments", we didn't have any need to hide them, but if you do, you could have your developer select the project role that is allowed to view when adding comments. Of course, that project role should NOT contain the client users, so you might have to create a new project role External Users.

Hope this helps!