Multi tiered service desk

[ferenc]

I am new to JIRA. We have a closed Service Desk, ie. only available for people with accounts. Got a requirement to setup our work flow so that it allows

• our "Portal Only" service desk users are able to create tickets (done) 
• our "Portal Only" service desk users can fill in a field with an email address (done)
• JIRA sends an email to that address that was filled in by our "Portal Only" service desk users (previous bullet point)

I cannot implement or configure JIRA to fulfill the 3rd bullet point, unless I switch the "Portal Only" guys to become proper Service Desk Agents. They can then invite any 3rd party and add them as watchers (assuming the 3rd party guys also register). 

So ideally we would need a multi tier (sort of) setup where "Portal Only" accounts have bit more privileges, than average Service Desk customers. 

Did I make any sense? Has anybody faced a similar "problem"? I'd appreciate any help. 

ps: I looked into the notifications as well, but was not able to send email notifications to non-registered JIRA users (for obvious reasons). 

[ferenc]

I have received a very kind reply from Atlassian Support. Let me share it with the community, hope it helps someone else too:

"I believe what you are looking for is the Request Participant feature. Depending on the Request Security, customers would also be able to add other customers as Request Participants to a request. If the request security for Manage what info customers can see when filling in a user field is set to Allow customers to browse by name or email, then the customer would be able to add other customers as participants to the request.

However, customers can only add existing customers to the service desk issue. We do have a feature request at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSD-3906 requesting to automatically create users as SD customers when added as request participant. Inline with Implementation of New Features Policy, I would suggest for you to add yourself as a watcher to receive updates on the progress of the issue and cast a vote on it to gain its popularity.

For more information, you can have a look at Adding request participants."