Project exports for customers

[James Betts]

Hi,

We have a fairly complex set of use cases brought on by a variety of different client requirements. Having looked at the community posts quite extensively my understanding is that there is no way for a customer to view a Kanban or anything similar without having a paid user license for their account.

This is confusing given that Asana (an inferior tool in basically every capacity except this) has the ability to add customers to projects without billing. That aside, is there any way to export the tasks within a project, along with their metadata (custom fields, etc.), to compile in some sort of report that can be provided to the customer?

The reason for this is that not every customer has just one stakeholder who will want/need this kind of information, so the cost can become prohibitive very quickly. Even allowing one stakeholder-per-client will have a not-insignificant cost.

We are considering funnelling them all into the Service Desk, but the Requests view is inadequate when the number of requests balloons as it has no native board view to make it easy to digest.

Is there any workaround that will keep costs down?

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

Hi @James Betts ! Did you manage to find a solution? One option that could work is to use Unito to sync Jira to a different tool. I've seen quite a few use-cases where people sync Jira issues to another platform (like Google Sheets, Trello, Airtable, etc.) so that external collaborators can view/edit issues without needing a Jira license. A lot of people don't want to give external members access to their Jira due to privacy, cost, etc., so creating a nice user-friendly board in Trello, or sheet in GSheets/Airtable and just syncing information from Jira works really well. Unito is a 3rd party app, so it has its own pricing, but it will definitely be cheaper than buying licenses for all your customers. 

[James Betts]

Hi @Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows

Not as yet, no. We put it on the back burner and are currently just bedding down with the vanilla service desk UI until there's a sufficient volumetric need to develop a customer-facing kanban. If for no other reason than I can't justify the additional cost to the business until then. Using external products may well be the way we go depending on the client's whitelist/blacklist (we have clients who can't use GSheets, for example).

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@James Betts I see, that makes sense. I've seen a lot of people use Unito for this use case, and it works really well if you need a bit of flexibility around what tools your customers can/can't use. For example, you might want to create a sheet for most customers, but for the ones that can't use GSheets, you could create a free Trello board for example, or even use their PM tool. Happy to provide more info if you need it/when you're ready to cross that bridge! 

[James Betts]

@Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows Thank you for the suggestion. I've bookmarked Unito so I can check it out. Do you know if it allows synchronisation between two different Jira instances? The 'balanced workload' automation is great in principle but if only 60% of a person's workload is in Jira then it's not going to work properly.

[Hannah Humbert - Simpla Workflows]

@James Betts yes, you can definitely sync two different Jira instances together with Unito! You just need to have a user login for both instances. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @James Betts 

Welcome to the community.

If you want a simple export of issue data, that is supported natively in Jira. From the Search Issue screen you can filter for the issues you want to include, and then select the Export button. It gives you a few different options for format and content.

If that does not meet your needs I think you will have to look into the third party apps in the Marketplace that might offer additional export options. 

And are you looking for a static export, or are you looking for a way to allow your customers to interact with your kanban board without incurring licensing costs? Those are two very different needs. If the latter, you may need to look for another tool that could integrate with Jira to re-present your kanban board data in a board format that would allow your customers to interact with the board without interacting directly with Jira. I don't know of any such tools specifically, but I've not tried to find such a tool before.

[James Betts]

Hi Trudy,

A static export is useful. Do you know if it's possible to create one that will automatically update using one of the native APIs in Jira? Either by connecting it to something like Google Sheets to auto-populate, or as a regular compiled export in a template that will drop as a PDF?

Having a kanban that the customer can interact with is the best solution, but having a view-only kanban they can access is sufficient. A good half-way house would be a kanban they can view tasks and leave comments on, even if they have no other interactions available. This would effectively just be a customised layout for what's already in the customer's end of Service Desk.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello James,

That is not a problem I've had to solve, so I don't have much info on solutions.

I know that there are third party apps available that will enable you to export data to a PDF. Here is one example:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/5167/better-pdf-exporter-for-jira?tab=overview&hosting=cloud

I know that you could set up a saved filter, and then subscribe to it yourself to receive the output in an email on a scheduled basis, which you could then forward to your customers.

There are a lot of tools available in the Marketplace to extend reporting, though I don't know if any provide additional export to PDF features.

If you don't want to pay a vendor for tools that could assist with this, you could investigate creating your own interface that utilizes the REST API to interact with Jira with authorized credentials as a middle-man, and an interface to present the info to your customers after your middle-man interface collects the data.