Multiple customer portals - Make one public without other portal's customers having access

[Merlin]

I have the following setup

• Customer portals A, B, C (Cloud Service Desk)
• Each of the portal's customers don't see the other portals

Now, I would like to open up portal A to email requests from anyone (public), while keeping other portal's customers restricted from seeing portal A. 

I couldn't find a way how to do this. When I amend Customer Permissions of portal A to "Anyone can send a request ..." the portal becomes visible to customers from portals B and C. Obviously, these customers get confused.

Possible ways of doing this 

• Disable customer portal A and use only email requests 
• Restrict Organisations of portals B and C from seeing portal A
• Purchasing another separate JIRA instance (would like to avoid that!)

Does anyone know if this is possible and what's the best way how to achieve this? Seems like an obvious need and I am sure not being the only with the same configuration. I see there were already multiple requests to be able to disable customer portal per project since a long time, has there been any progress whatsoever? 

Thanks

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Tom,

I believe that the best option, in this case, is to disable the portal and let it only for email requests.
If you want to anyone to send requests, any customer will be able to send the email and see the portal, so you can remove all the request types of the portal, so customers who access will not see anything.
If you still want to allow customers from portal A to open tickets through the portal, you can create a fourth project.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Angélica

[Merlin]

Hi Angélica,

Thanks for your response. There are few issues though.

1. On my project A, when I have emails enabled, I can't delete the last email enabled request type of the portal - the remove button is greyed out.
2. When I try to work around this and disable emails first, I am able to delete the last request type, but not able to turn the email on again "Error when turning on email. To receive requests by email, you must have a request type with visible Summary and Description fields." As expected.
3. Lastly, even when all request types are removed of project A, customers of projects B and C can see the project in the portals list! When they open it, it says "There are no request types configured for this Service Desk." Why would this be shown to customers? It's only confusing.

Honestly Angelica, from Atlassian team I would expect a more investigative and tested answers before throwing solutions on us.

So, the question still stays unanswered.

Thanks,

Tom

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Tom,

1 and 2 - It's not possible to disable because the request type is associated with the email channel, so you must disable the "Email requests" or change the request type associated with the email channel.

3 - This is expected because the customer portal cannot be disabled on a project, so when a customer access the portal it will show a message that they don't have access.
We have a feature request suggesting the implementation of the ability to disable the portal:
- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-1012

I understand that may be confusing to customers access a portal with an error message, but you can add a custom message on the Introduction text of the portal.

I'm sorry that we can't be more helpful on it.

Regards,
Angélica

[Merlin]

So the answer is: we can't have email only public service desk that would be also invisible from other portals, correct?

As a follow up question: Can I have new portal-only customers sign up for a service desk via email portalA@ that would be restricted to other portals' customers (unless they use the same email portalA@ to sign up)?

In other words, if anyone sends email to portalA@ (Portal A), it would create a new customer portal-only account for them and create a ticket. If I am a customer of portal B and not portal A, I would not see the portal/project in the portal list.

Thanks

Tom

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Tom,

The only option to have an email for a project, is creating a SD project and as it's not possible to disable the customer portal, your current customers may not know the email, but they will see a blank portal if they click on the project's name on the portal.

Can I have new portal-only customers sign up for a service desk via email portalA@ that would be restricted to other portals' customers (unless they use the same email portalA@ to sign up)?

If you will allow customers to create their own accounts through the portal or email, automatically the accounts of all existing customers will be copied to the customers' page, so yes, they will have access anyway.

Regards,
Angélica

[Merlin]

When we keep the option "Who can access the portal and send requests" to "Customers my team adds to the project", what happens to emails that are sent from non-registered customers? Do they get automatically discarded?

If yes, could there be a notification / automation in place when such event happens, so we make sure no one is left behind?

The use case for us is based on that we need to be able to have anyone submit a request by email without making the portal visible to existing other portal customers.

Thanks

Tom

[Angélica Luz]

Hi Tom,

Yes, the emails will be rejected and the message in the logs is "Signup is not currently available".
There is no notification about rejected emails, but you can check on the Audit log by going to Jira settings > Applications > Email requests > Click on "View log" on the email you need to see the rejected emails.

Regards,
Angélica