Licensed Users cannot open Portal without using incognito

[Michael J_ Stearns]

I have a team managed JSM project.  My team cannot open the JSM portal while logged to any Atlassian project (Jira, Confluence).  However, if they open an incognito window they are allowed to access the portal, assuming because that window is not authenticated and logged in.  Why does that happen and how can I fix it?

[Samuel Gatica _ServiceRocket_]

HI @Michael J_ Stearns 

Welcome to the community!

What you're describing typically happens when Atlassian identifies the user as an "agent" or internal user, rather than as a portal customer, which causes permission issues when accessing the Help Center or customer portal.

Why it happens:

When a user is logged in to Atlassian (Jira Software, Confluence, etc.), Atlassian checks what kind of access they have:

If they are a licensed user in your JSM project (like agents), they can access the agent view of requests.

If they are not a JSM agent and also not added as a portal customer, then Atlassian will block them from accessing the portal with a message like “You don’t have access to this service project.”

In incognito, they aren’t logged in—so they access the portal as anonymous/portal-only users (if it's allowed), and if their email is registered as a customer, they get in.

If you are logged in Jira you can open the JSM project and open the portal using the menu "Raise a Ticket" or manually copy the portal URL from the channel section. 

Best regards 

Sam