Granting watching options to specific users in Jira

[Leon Gumba]

Hi everyone!

So here's the situation. We have a Compliance Jira project in our cloud instance, and it has pretty strict permission rules. Basically, only the members of the Compliance department group can access this project, create issues in it, leave comments, etc.

But now they have reached out to me and told me that they have created a few new issues and they need input from some people from other departments, and those people obviously don't have access to the Compliance project as I stated before. They can't see the project and can't see those issues but they are expected to work on them.

What is the best way to grant permissions to those users from outside of the Compliance department so that they can only access those issues where their input is needed? I can't add them as Watchers because they don't have the "Browse Projects" permission. And if I grant them that permission, all of the issues will be open to them, which the Compliance team obviously wants to avoid.

How do I manage this?

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

You need to implement an issue security scheme with two levels, one that allows users not from the compliance team to view and comment on specific issues and the second one that is set on issues that only the compliance team should have access to. Once you applied the security levels to all issues you need to open up the project so the external users can browse and at least comment on issues. By doing this the external users will have access to the project, but will only see issues that have the external security level set on them. Have a look at this KB for more information.

[Leon Gumba]

@Mikael Sandberg hey there! Thank you very much for your response!

So, let's play out a scenario right here. Let's say there are currently 100 issues in the Compliance project. 10 of those need input from people outside the Compliance department. I need to create 2 issue security levels like you said, right? One for the Compliance team only and another that includes both the Compliance team and the external group. Then, I need to bulk change all the issues and apply the first security level to the 90 internal issues and the second level to the 10 external issues? Am I getting it right?

And after that I also need to grant those external users the "Browse Project" and "Add Comment" permissions like you mentioned.

[Mikael Sandberg]

Yes, that is correct. And what you can do in the issue security scheme is set the internal level as the default and then on the issues that need external input you can manually change the security level.

[Leon Gumba]

@Mikael Sandberg amazing, thank you! Will be doing that.