Not grasping organizations

[Patrick Windsor]

I have been using JIRA for our internal project management and software development for years, I am now looking to migrate our help desk to JIRA Service Desk from FreshService. I have been reading a lot about permissions and user management and I am still confused on the whole concept of an "Organization". I am a managed service provider and have several external customers. Here is my use case and questions. 

Use Case 

I have 2 customers, Acme Inc and Generic Inc and I create two separate service desk "projects", one for each customer.

Questions

1. When I create a service desk for Acme does it create an organization just for Acme?

2. I am assuming that when I set the customer permission to: "Other customers in their organization. This option only allows them to search for customers in their organization." that Acme will not be able to share OR SEE Generic Inc's tickets? Its important that each company cannot see each other tickets or share a ticket.

3. If the first two questions are No, does that mean an organization is my company "Risetime"?

[Ed Letifov _TechTime - New Zealand_ · Accepted solution]

Organisations are used inside one project. If the essence of your service, your KB, your team, your workflows, your SLAs, your type of requests are exactly the same for your two customers, why would you want to have different JSD projects? what added value would that give you? If these are very different - it's a different situation. 

So if you support all your customers from the same project, you can group individual users (think of them as reporters) into an organisation. This is manual (or you can make some automation using ScriptRunner or something similar to group them based on their email domain for example).

A userB won't be able to see a request raised by userA, unless it is shared with them. You can either share by adding individual users to Request Participants (similar to CC on the email - and by default they receive all notifications about the request) or by sharing to the whole organisation (this allows people to find the request in Customer Portal if needed as "raised by others" but they won't get notified on every sneeze by default)

The 2 things that using organisations give you: 1) this ability to share (i.e. give access) a request raised by an individual to their whole org - any users from the org including those that may be added in the future (think your own Managed Service use case vs. say HR use case where this might not be desired at all) 2) ability to restrict who the Reporter or Request Participant can share to via adding other Request Participants.

[Hernan Halabi - Elite IT Consulting Group · Accepted solution]

Hello @Patrick Windsor 

Organizations are like groups but you don't need admin rights to manage who is in there. You wouldn't need to create two projects unless each customer has different set of request types or options within the fields. Basically because answer to the second question is yes, you are right. A user that is in organization A can't see organization B nor their members unless the user belongs to both organizations.

Regarding item A, you must create the organization, it's not automatically created but you can later reuse it on another project.

I didn't get the question 3 so I'll need clarification on that one

[Patrick Windsor]

@Hernan Halabi - Elite IT Consulting Group Thank you for your response
As I mentioned, I am a Managed Service provider and we manage multiple customers and multiple systems. I want to create a support desk for each customer as they each have their own unique needs. None of my customers would have "Agent" access, only my support teams would get the status. My customers would be Customers in JIRA. So do customers belong to an organization?

[Patrick Windsor]

One other follow-up question, if I create the organization and my customers create an account on their own (I have set "Anyone can send a request via the portal or support@xxxxxx.atlassian.net"), will their account get added to the Organization automatically or do I need to add them.

[Hernan Halabi - Elite IT Consulting Group]

Hi @Patrick Windsor based on your input then yes, one project per client. Since that is going to be the case you can avoid creating the organization, this depends on the following.

If you expect that every member of that project can see the tickets if their partners, then create it.

If tickets would only be shared with just a few, then don't create it.

If the customer will have access to more than one portal, then create it.

Notice that the organization is independent of the project setup so customers don't belong to it just because they are in that project.

About the follow up question, a new customer won't be automatically added to an organization but I believe you can configure it for that to happen with some automation configuration behind the scenes. Anyhow, you shouldn't allow anyone to create tickets on the portal because that will include your other customers that are not supposed to see the other projects.

A nice solution would be something like the following

You have a public project where anyone can create a ticket, the only ticket they can create there is one that says gain access to my company portal. As ticket gets created, the automation I talked before adds the user to the organization based on the email domain. Since the user is now part of an organization, and that organization is configured in another project, the user can now see the portal of his company and didn't need human interaction. Certainly in the project of the customer, the permissions should be that only customers added can create tickets there.

I hope this helps

[SUNMI HELP DESK]

Ask a question: there is an Organizations field in the JSD ticket. What is the function and function of this field?