Track customer organisation without sharing

[David Fairlie-Jones]

I am trying to set up a Jira Service Management portal for external customers. This will be configured so that anyone can access the portal. 

I would like to be able to filter issues by the customer organization, ideally by using the reporter's email domain. The goal is to achieve things like creating queues based on organisation, SLAs based on organisation, reports based on organisation, and so on. 

I tried using the automation to set the issue's organization based on the reporter's email domain, this does tag each issue with the customer's organization but it also has the side effect of sharing all issues with everyone else in that organization. We do not want sharing for a variety of reasons, unless the user deliberately chooses to share an issue. 

Any suggestion on the best way to achieve finding issues by the customer organization without sharing issues with everyone in the organization? 

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so · Accepted solution]

Hi @David Fairlie-Jones .

Jira Service Management has a global setting that determines whether requests are automatically shared with an organisation: 

You can find the setting under: 

https://YOURDOMAIN.atlassian.net/jira/settings/products/jira-service-management-configuration

Changing the setting should stop the automatic sharing. 

Cheers,
Jens

Released.so - Release notes powered by Jira

[David Fairlie-Jones]

Hi @Jens Schumacher - Released_so

You've hit on the crux of my challenge. I want to be able to turn this setting off so that issues are not shared with the customer's organization, but I would still like to be able to filter for issues raised by that organization. 

With that setting on, I can easily query/filter on the issue organization. With it off, I don't know what criteria to search on. Is there a good way to achieve that outcome without setting the issue's organization? 

David

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so]

Hi @David Fairlie-Jones 

I see. Another option would be to use a custom field to store the organisation name instead of in the organisation field. That would stop the issue from being shared, while it would still allow you to filter based on the values. 

Would that be an option? 

Cheers,
Jens

Released.so - Release notes powered by Jira

[Dan Breyen]

There is a JIRA ticket to allow Organizations to be sortable in JQL. I would suggest voting for that ticket. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-4548

[David Fairlie-Jones]

@Jens Schumacher - Released_so thanks, yes I'm coming to the conclusion that's what I'll have to do. I guess create a new field on the issues and have an automation to populate it on issue creation. 

Does seem like the use of organisations in JSM and organising customers could use a bit of refinement! Thanks for your help. 

[Dan Breyen]

@David Fairlie-Jones Even if you turn that off you can still use JQL to find a particular organization.  I do it that way in my reports.  

Organizations = "Organization Name"

(I agree about refinement for organizations :) )

[David Fairlie-Jones]

@Dan Breyen yes true, but from what I understand as soon as you've attached an issue to an organisation then it is shared with everyone in the organisation, so to avoid sharing I have to have issues without organisations (and thus nothing to query on).

I've managed to get a workaround going where an automation populates a custom field on an issue with the email domain of the reporter. I can then use that to set SLAs, reports, etc. I then ran into the next issue where the matching on text fields is a bit wonky in Jira (only supports the ~ operator, not the = operator, and special characters like . are skipped in comparisons so I am half expecting random results), and also these fields cannot be used to sort when added to queues. 

I guess the other possibility would be to use JQL to query for issues based on the organisation of the reporter, but that's a little less intuitive for other people just using JSM who don't get into the nuts and bolts of it. Also having a custom field means I can update it if, for example, we get a support request from someone at gmail.com, to the actual customer organisational domain. 

I think organisations seem to work well as a sharing mechanism, but not at all for organising your JSM external users into customer groups. 

[Dan Breyen]

If you have the 'Should new requests automatically be shared with a customer's organization' set to no, I don't see the automatic sharing happening.  I was getting alot of complaints about our internal customer issues getting sent to everyone until I turned it off. 

[David Fairlie-Jones]

@Dan Breyen yep that's true, but that also stops the issues being marked with the organization. Seems to be tied together - out of the box you can mark an issue with an organisation and it will be shared with everyone in that organisation, or neither of those things. I turned off that seting to stop sharing but now I have to implement workarounds to set a custom field with the customer's org so I can sort/filter/queue/SLA issues on that basis. 

[Dan Breyen]

@David Fairlie-Jones  I have an Automation that fills in the Organization as long as the customer only has one (but if there are multiples, it would work too), and I don't get any emails sent out to everyone when the Organization is added.   I have the Organization set on the issue, so I can use JQL to filter by Organization.  

Good Luck.  

[David Fairlie-Jones]

Hi @Dan Breyen

Yes that does work, but if you login to your portal with a customer/user that is part of the organization, then in the top right if you click the "requests" button you'll see options: all, created by me, and shared with the organization. So you can solve the annoying notifications to every customer in the organization, but all those customers will still be able to see each other's issues if they go looking, which is not always ideal. 

[Corinna Falkenberg]

Hi @David Fairlie-Jones ,

I am struggling with the exact same issue as you did. We are basically looking for a way to allow some "key users" of the organizations to view any ticket, but generally we don't want the reporters to see all the tickets reported by the organization, just those they reported themselves. I kind of cannot believe that this is not supported by Jira, as this is really a basic need due to Data Security Obligations. I was just interested if you found a solution for your company? :) 

I tried to use the issue security function and this would probably work to limit the views just to the reporter, but then we cannot serve the need of the key users I mentioned above.

Using a custom field for the organization would be worst case scenario for us as this limits all the organization management features the tool offers... 

Thank you regards

Corinna

[Dan Breyen]

There is a JIRA ticket to allow Organizations to be sortable in JQL. I would suggest voting for that ticket. https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-4548