Is there a way to have specific customer approvals w/o needing to have customers have an account?

[Jamesson]

My team recently adopted Jira at my organization. However, there are several other teams that do not use Jira. We still need to accept work from customers, and they still need to give approval to perform work, or to sign off that work has been completed. We're already essentially maxxed at our Jira user cap; is there any way to allow specific people to have approval access without using all of the licenses? This also doesn't need to be a Jira solution; if this can be solved with Confluence or Service Desk or some other system I'm not thinking of, I'm all ears.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Jamesson,

It's possible to properly set customers who do not have a JIRA license to be the approvers in JIRA Service Desk, however, the approval used in JIRA Service Desk can be configured to allow the progress in the workflow (change issue status) and not to log work.

That been said, you can properly block anyone to log work by using workflow properties until they reach a determined status where the approval would be required.

To allow customers to be approvers, you just need to configure your Customer permissions to properly do it:

- Navigate to your project > Project settings > Customer Permissions 

- in the Who can customers share request with? section, flag the option Any customer or organization, by searching in this project.

Once you perform the steps above, you can choose if you would like to Allow customers to choose approvers or Set up a pre-set list of approvers. You can check how you can choose these options in the documentation below:

- Setting up approvals

Let me know if this information helps.

[Jamesson]

Thank you for responding!

I'm sorry, your answer was a little difficult to follow: you say that you can set customers who do not have a Jira license to be approvers in Jira Service Desk, but the "however" attached to that statement started talking about logging work; I think that I'm missing the connection between the two.

I saw this paragraph at the top of the link you sent me:

"Some requests might need approval before your team can work on them. For example, a manager might approve leave requests, or an IT manager might approve new system accounts. People don't need a Jira Service Desk license to approve requests—they just have to be customers of the service desk project."

How does Jira Service Desk know that the person doing the spproving is who they say they are without credentials? Is it just through email?

[Jamesson]

Hello? Just refreshing this issue.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Jamesson,

Sorry for the late reply.

Please, let me know if the explanation below helps you to better understand how you can set approvals to log work in JIRA:

Basically, it is not possible to set approvals to allow/restrict the log work on JIRA directly. The approval feature can only be configured to block/allow the progress in the workflow, as you can see in the documentation provided before.

That been said, you can use workflow properties to block users to log work on all the status that you have before the approval is performed. Performing these steps, the users will be able to log work in the issue only in the status available after the request is approved.

About your last question:

How does Jira Service Desk know that the person doing the spproving is who they say they are without credentials? Is it just through email?

Yes, the approvers are identified by their e-mail, since you can check who has approved in the history of the issue.

That been said, there are two ways to perform it:

- Set the approvers from the agent side

- Let the customer set their own approvers, so the agent would just need to check if the approver is using the expected email to do it

In both cases, the agent will need to know the e-mail of the approver.