Prevent external Service Desk comments for specific users

[Irtiza Rizvi]

Hello,

We have a Service Desk project where we have people working on SD issues that are not meant to respond to the customers.  As far as we know, everyone that can edit/transition a SD issue needs a SD license, and therefore can respond to customer.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/JIRA-Service-Desk-questions/assign-issue-to-non-agent/qaq-p/16568

Is there a good workaround for this so we can have users edit/transition a SD issue but cannot respond to customer?

[Irtiza Rizvi]

A couple approaches tried so far:

1) Use JavaScript in the Announcement Banner to hide the ability to share with customer / respond to customer based on user permissions

Problem: extremely fragile and clunky solution, since there are many places (edit issue comment box, transition screens, comment section) where a user can respond to customer.  Also, we need the ability to find the user group information for the logged in user in JS, which is doable through the REST API, but again, very clunky and not good performance-wise.

2) Use a custom script listener on Issue Commented event that will change the comment from external to internal if the user isn't in a particular group (have also tried deleting the external comment and re-creating it as internal)

Problem: we have SLAs and automation built around external/internal comments.  For example, when a user shares a comment with a customer, it goes to the "Waiting for Customer" status.  We'd need to transition that issue back if we change the comment property or re-create the comment as internal.  If there is a way to "intercept" an issue commented event and prevent it from happening or change the comment to internal BEFORE the transition, that would solve a lot of problems.

Thanks.

[Benjamin Peikes]

This is definitely possible. You can have normal Jira users who are not service desk agents. They will be able to comment internally, but will not be able to communicate with customer or transition the ticket.

One way we've also dealt with this is to:

1) Create an internal Jira ticket which is linked to the ticket.

2) Set up an automation rule which adds an internal comment when that internal ticket state has changed. This allows the person assigned the Service Desk ticket get notified when the internal ticket has been resolved.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

Could you use permissions so that those users cannot comment?

[Irtiza Rizvi]

Is there a way to set the permissions on a Service Desk project so that a user can comment internally but NOT respond to customer?  That user would also have to be able to edit and transition an issue.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Not that I know of.  SOunds tricky