Same JIRA instance for both internal use and external use?

[Vincent Tsang]

Hi,

We use JIRA for our own internal bug/issue tracking. 

But at the same time we also want to use JIRA for our external customers to report product issues/feature requests to us. 

Then if an externally reported issue triggers some work we want to track internally (hence an internal ticket is filed) we want to establish some linkage between the two.

I thought of the following two approaches to solve this problem:

1. Set up only one JIRA instance for both our internal staff and external customers. Then make sure the grouping/permissions are set up right and very carefully such that customers only have access to the projects they're exposed to but not the internal projects hence they can't see our internal tickets. Then I expect (but I haven't verified it) we are able to link an external ticket with an internal one but customers can't really access the internal ticket (as they don't have access to that project) even if they may see the link.

2. Set up two separate JIRA instances - one for internal use and one for external use. This sounds easier from security perspective, but then we need to pay more JIRA license cost and we need to find some JIRA plugin (or even write one if none exists) to solve the linkage problem between internal tickets and external tickets.

May I ask if there is some common/official recommendation on which approach is the best/standard practice? 

Thanks!

Vincent

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist]]

I would usually suggest option 1 unless there are serious security constraints.

Depending on the use cases, take a look at JIRA Service Desk too!

[Vincent Tsang]

Thanks for the suggestion. I just found this though:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/enterprise/federating-jira-managing-multiple-instances-461504624.html

So Atlassian themselves are doing Option 2... makes me wonder if this would be their official recommendation on this topic...