Alternatives for notifying employees of task statuses instead of adding them as watchers

[Christel Gray]

We have about 300 Jira users that don't actually use Jira, but were added as licensed users to be added to specific issues as a Watcher. This is so they get email notifications when a comment is added or when an issue is transitioned. 

This practice eats up a lot of licenses for people who don't interact with Jira (that never log in, added comments, create issues, transition issues, etc.).

I'm hoping the community can help me brainstorm ideas for an alternative. Otherwise, we're going to have to increase our license tier, which we are trying to avoid.

Additional information:

* This was set-up long before I came on board, so I don't have all the history.

* Watchers are added individually to issues, so it's not a specific group watching issues based on criteria (as far as I can tell). 

I'll update this as you have more questions and I can answer them.

Thanks!

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Consider creating a Distribution list (DL) in your Mail server and add that distribution list as a licensed Jira user. Of course this means that all 300 users would be notified on any issue where are the DL was added as a watcher. So likely not the best solution. However if you can qualify users into various distribution lists you could better control this issue.

Another consideration is leveraging automation and sending emails to individuals that do not have Jira licenses when comments are added. The downside here is that you need to I have a lot of rules to manage who gets the notifications.

In summary, there are solutions but without really understanding the way your teams work together it is hard to say what the best approach would be. Ultimately if you need a lot of flexibility in who is being added as a watcher then the only real way to deal with that is to make them Jira users. But if they can be grouped together then there are options.

[Christel Gray]

Thanks, Jack! That's a really good idea. I'm going to research more into who the users are and if there's a way to group them. Thanks for the idea!