Non-Licensed Users as Watchers

[Russell Brown]

We use Jira as an IT tool, so only our IT team has licenses to Jira, as 99% of what is done there would never involve the business. That said, I want to find a way to track our stakeholders and send email notifications based on what is relevant to them. 

Is there a way to have non-licensed users referenced as 'lookups' in Jira to access more information on them and leverage the tool better to communicate the status of their requests back to them?

It would be amazing to have a 'ghost' user profile that (for all I care) wouldn't allow access to see anything but would allow us to reference the user for reporting, automation, etc. 

Thoughts? Help? 

(Previously, I was working on doing a lookup to Microsoft to grab user details and emails, but that is way less than ideal and had to be done with a text field, which, as you can imagine, caused a lot of problems.) 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Russell Brown 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

What information do you want for those users?

Would it be adequate to manually enter the users' emails into a custom field that you could then parse in an Automation Rule and use in the Send Email action to send those users some update about the issue?

[Russell Brown]

Yeah, that crossed my mind.

Communication of the work is as important as the work itself. Our team supports three companies (that make up the whole). Don't want to over engineer it, but managing our company's teams, their status, etc... it's a lot. Thankfully I came from Marketing and Web Design, I've built out a pretty robust series of email templates and queries that drive them.

I've been working on a 'preference center' of sorts to help with this...

There is little return on having 'business users' in Jira just try and track tickets when they simply want to know what the status is and what other work impacts their area. The ability to share reports and release notes would be amazing.

Ideally, a license type that allows a reference to internal users or the ability to access reports and dashboards but not see the actual ticket or edit them would be amazing... maybe something similar to Jira Product Discovery... idk. 

To be clear, I'm a huge fan of Jira and Confluence and advocating for it more and more where I work, and we oversee a similar system (that is far more robust).