Is there a way to enable external requests for a Jira Software project?

[Robin Tenfelde]

The issue:

There is a pre-existing, team managed, jira software project. Currently, only members of this Project can create issues. As it was now requested, all employees should become able to create issues here, like with a JSM project, either over the serive portal, or Emails.

Not all employees have any Jira licenses.

What I've already tried:

I already created a new access role, theoretically allowing everyone in the company to "create issues" but unfortunatley, only Jira users can actually access the Board still. And opening the board, or giving everyone a Jira license, is not desirable anyway.

Is there any way to bypass this? 

Ive found similar issues here: 

Solved: Is it possible to enable email request feature for...

and here: 

Create work items and comments from email | Atlassian Support

But it says it will still only work for licensed users.

GPT told me its theoretically possible to create a separate JSM project and link the issues from there to the Jira Sostware project, but im not sure if or how exactly that can be achieved.

Is there any other way to configure this, other than migrating the entire board to JSM?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Robin Tenfelde and welcome to the Community!

Atlassian just announced the availability of Forms for Jira projects that should be able to support what you're after.

You should be able to find forms in your project navigation:

As this is currently rolling out, you might not be able to share them publicly yet - but this is coming very soon.

Check out Forms support documentation to learn more.

Hope this helps!

[Trudy Claspill]

Adding to this...

Public forms will give your employees the ability to submit requests, but I don't believe that will give them the ability to see the board or otherwise use the Jira application to view or update the issue.

[Robin Tenfelde]

They are not supposed to actually see the board, what is most important it sthat everyone,a nd even those without a jira license can create a request

[Robin Tenfelde]

Thank you, it worked so far, but its true, i cannot share them publically yet. 

But if this does take longer, is there any alternative?

[Walter Buggenhout]

As you can see in this update from the cloud roadmap, it is rolling out in the current quarter:

An alternative might be to use Jira Service Management for request intake. Customers / external users do not have to pay for a license (but your first line employees do). You can build request forms there as well, but will probably need to build automation rules to forward the created tickets into your normal Jira project for further manipulation.

[Robin Tenfelde]

Alright. But do you think in these cases its still possible to establisha  line of communication with the customer, as in, commenting within the Software board, and the comment then gets forwarded to the JSM ticket and thus, the requesters mail?

Im not so knowledgeable on Jira automation, so far ive only had AIs assure me that this is totally possible, and i'd like a human confirmation

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Robin Tenfelde 

With Regard to Public Forms the documentation says that the email of the form will have a required Email field for the submitter to enter their email, and the submitter's email will be added as a Comment in the related work items. 

Only licensed users can be added to the user-specification fields, like Reporter and Watcher, that are used with the Notifications configuration for work items in a project, so that method of automatically notifying the submitter can't be used.

If you wanted emails to be sent to the user you would have to set up a custom notification method, like Automation Rules, that could extract the submitter email and send an email even though the submitter is not a licensed user. 

I don't think that Jira would process replies from the sender to those emails and add them to Comments on the issue.

I have not actually tested this since I don't have access yet to an environment that has Public Forms. 

If you choose to use JSM, copying the tickets into your Software project, if you use  Automation Rules to copy Comments from the Software issue to the JSM issue then those Comments would be sent to the Customer. If the Customer made comments on the JSM issue and you copied those to the Software issue, then the Notifications for your Software project would determine to whom those comments would then be sent.