Sharing incidents with external people

[Anne-Sophie G]

Hi,

We are thinking about using Jira Service Management for managing incidents.

However, we often need to share specific incidents with external auditors (who are not part of our company). Today, this is done with our current incident system by exporting the incident reports into PDF and emailing the PDFs.

If we move to Jira, there is no built-in PDF export, and the "Print" option does not export all fields. We don't want to spend time managing Jira accounts and accesses for external people, since they only need to view a few issues for a limited amount of time.

We are exploring PDF export add-ons, but they come with limitations in terms of what fields can be exported. We are also looking into External Share for Jira, which allows to share a filter with a temporary, password-protected link - it looks great.

I am curious to hear if someone has already faced the same situation, and what was the solution? Any thoughts?

[Aaron Morris]

Hi @Anne-Sophie G -- This is a very common problem and concern.  There are a few solutions, but the most common (in my experience) is to use a third-party reporting tool.  How well a reporting tool may work depends on your technology stack.  Specifically:

1. Are you using Data Center or Cloud?
2. Are you using any third-party apps with data that must be included in the report? For example, an electronic signature app, test coverage app, etc.?

Primary limitation:

The fundamental limitation you'll encounter is that data stored in third-party apps is sometimes inaccessible to reporting tools. This is more true in the Cloud vs. Data Center, simply due to Atlassian's application architecture.  (Cloud apps don't have the same level of access to Jira's native database, for obvious reasons.)

I've never used External Share for Jira...it seems pretty cool...but I expect it will encounter the same necessary limitations as any of the reporting tools.

Reporting options:

All of that said...assuming you're not impacted by the above limitation...I have personal experience using "Better PDF Exporter" and "Xporter" as two powerful reporting apps.  The are both customizable and are capable of most reporting on almost any field.

If you are impacted by the above limitation...and you don't want to grant system access to the auditor...then the best solution I've seen is the old "print screen" trick.  I know it's lame. :-(  But it's the best way to show an auditor any information displayed on the screen, even if that information is inaccessible to a reporting tool. 

Specifically, I've seen "print screen" used to create "audit reports" for Jira issues when the electronic signatures came from one external system and the test coverage came from another external system.  Signatures and test coverage were displayed on the screen through apps, but the data was stored externally from Jira and thus couldn't be reported on any other way from within Jira.

Hope this helps.

[David Cowley]

We're still on server (migrating to Cloud) and have used Xporter onprem as our solution here. Good to know that we might be encountering some limitations in Cloud so that we can test for them in advance.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

Thanks for mentioning Better PDF Exporter!

@Anne-Sophie G Give Better PDF Exporter a try for reporting and reach out to us if you encounter any fields you have a problem exporting. We will look into it if we can give you a quick fix or take it onto our roadmap to fix it eventually.