Jira Software - read only access for customers

Helen Valtmann-Valdson December 19, 2016

Hello

I wanted to ask if anybody knows if JIRA Software allows to add customers as read-only users to see their projects?

Also there is a question about licensing. If there is a possibility is it for free or license fee?

Thank you in advance

Helen

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Walter Buggenhout
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December 19, 2016

Hi Helen,

You can add users to JIRA Software and use the permission scheme of your projects to make them look as if they were read only. That's just a matter of granting the right permissions to your customers on that specific project. For a detailed listing of permissions, see this page.

To answer your licensing question: every user you grant access to JIRA Software counts as a license seed. Even if you would only allow them to browse projects and deny them any changes.

If you have a lot of customers that you want to allow creating issues, following up on them and exchanging comments with you about them, you might want to take a look at JIRA Service Desk. With that product, you grant your customers limited access through a custom portal and they don't count as licensed users. To service them, you would normally have a limited number of users (agents) who triage the issues and communicate between the customer and the software team(s). Check this page to start learning a bit more.

Mark Boomer June 11, 2017

I have followed a number of articles for creating a group of read-only users but no whatever I have tried the users always can edit/create issues in the project.

My steps have been

1. Create read-only users
2. Create read-only group
3. Add read-only users to read-only group. 
4. Remove read-only users from default 'jira-users' group
5. Grant read-only Group application access to JIRA
6. Create a Project Role named Read-Only Users and add the read-only Group to it.
7. Add the read-only project Role to the "Browse Projects" permission in the project Scheme scheme. 

But the read-only users can still edit and create issues.

What am I missing?

Mark Boomer June 11, 2017

I suspect that there is more to do with the permission scheme than to just add the read-only project role to the Brosw Projects in the project permission scheme

Mark Boomer June 11, 2017

I'm using JIRA 7 so it seems like the trick is to remove all the occurances of the "Application access (Any logged in user)" and replace this with a project role that includes all users, except the read-only users. Then add the read-only role to the browse projects permission so it looks like

Browse Projects               Project role
                                           * External Role
                                           * Internal Role

This seems to be the bit I was missing

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Walter Buggenhout
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
June 11, 2017

Nice to see you've gotten there, Mark. Just to add to that - and as a confirmation - it is indeed your permission scheme that sets the permissions for your users at project level.

Permissions are event based and it's important to come to grips with all the different permissions and the way they can be granted: through project roles, groups, issue roles (like assignee, reporter), user custom fields and so on.

If you notice a user has too many / not enough permissions, check the different permissions granted through the permission scheme and check how e.g. the create/edit issues permission are being granted.

And last but not least, you could use the permission helper to check if (and often also why) a certain user does (not) have the expected permissions. See the documentation for a bit more info.

Mike Colombo September 20, 2019

Atlassian should definitely allow for a free, read-only user. Every SaaS software has it. It's super annoying to try to use Confluence for documentation, but not be able to send a link to the documentation to a customer.

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