How to configure JSM for reporting tickets against different websites

[Dave Jenkins]

Hi,

We're evaluating JSM as a replacement for an in-house support ticket system, which allows users to report an issue with their website. We are a web agency looking after many sites for many organisations.

In the existing system:

• A client user (customer) belongs to one or more client organizations.
• A client organization has one or more websites.
• The portal for clients lists the websites associated with the client user (via their client organizations) and allows them to report an issue with their website by clicking on the relevant site from the list.
• For each website, admins can configure a list of default subscribers for tickets reported against that site: people who will receive email notifications about the ticket.
• When staff view a ticket, the name of the website it's reported against is displayed as a link to a page on our intranet holding useful details of the site.

So the website is a key piece of information on a ticket, with multiple purposes:

• Tells us which site the issue relates to.
• Provides a link to site details.
• Determines who will receive email notifications about the ticket.
• Is selected from a fixed set of options that depends on which organizations the user belongs to.

From what we've seen so far in JSM, one possibility might be to use Organizations to represent websites. When creating a ticket, the "Share with" field could specify the organization (website). For users who are only associated with one organization (website), the "Share with" field could be pre-filled; otherwise the user would need to select the organization (website).

This approach doesn't seem very user-friendly for the client: "Share with" is not an intuitive label for a field that we intend to mean, "Please select the website where the problem is occurring". Also the "No one" option makes little sense in this context. From what I've read, this field's label can't be changed and the "no one" option can't be removed.

It would help somewhat if we could pre-fill the field even for users with multiple sites, perhaps as follows:

• Generate a list of links, one for each of the user's sites, where each is a create ticket link including a parameter identifying the site. This list could be within JSM if possible - is it? Or otherwise perhaps on our intranet.
• Customise the create ticket form to check this parameter and pre-fill the "Share with" field accordingly. Is that possible, if so how might we go about this?

It would also be great if, when staff view a ticket, we could display the organization (website) as a link, where the URL includes a parameter identifying the website. E.g. this could be a link to our intranet. Any way to do that?

Is there a better way to go about this?

Many thanks in advance for any sage advice!

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Hey @Dave Jenkins and welcome to the community!

I personally don't feel like using the organisation feature of JSM would be the right way to go. This feature is mainly designed to easily share tickets/issues with a group of customers. 

For you this could be several people that are allowed to register tickets and when the organisation field is set they can share the ticket by default with all the members of that organisation.

For the rest of your requirements it sounds like you would need some kind of structure where you can link a set of websites to a specific organisation. Would using the asset management database (Insight (soon to be renamed to Assets)) not provide a better outcome?

You could link a specific customer/organisation/.. to the asset (being the website) and filter that they can only see the ones that they actually are allowed to register tickets for.

Based on that you could also run some automations to fill in other custom fields of the ticket or even send out a (mass) email to a group of customers/users.

So in my opinion (without doing a deep dive/workshop about the requirements) I feel that the CMDB/Asset Management Database would be the place to store the information and provide the filtering and you could use organisation mainly to filter out some things and/or provide a default share option.

If you would like to deep dive into this and really challenge your requirement(s) for a tool selection I would suggest/advice to reach out to a partner  (https://partnerdirectory.atlassian.com) and based on your requirements have them do a POC/demo so you can at least challenge the items visually and directly to the solution partner.

[Dave Jenkins]

Hi @Dirk Ronsmans , many thanks for your very helpful response. I hadn't come across Insight, so that's an interesting new direction to explore. It looks as though this is now only available as part of the Premium or Enterprise cloud plans, we're on Standard.

I've had a look for marketplace apps for asset management and found some options that look worth assessing, from basic asset lists to External Data for Jira Fields, which looks like it could open up possibilities such as querying a list of sites from our intranet, "Real-time search and dependant details".

We'll do some more research. Glad to see that there are better options than using "Share with" for this purpose - thanks again!