How to limit permissions for a vendor on my JIRA instance

[Jim Fioretti]

I'm using JIRA for bug reporting for our organization (our employees). I want to give a Vendor limited access for JIRA Kanban functionality only. I don't want them to be able to see or modify any JIRA tickets. I've looked at the user level and I'm not finding anything there. Can you let me know how this can be done? I've reviewed a good deal of documentation and it's unclear how I can define JIRA tickets vs. just Kanban away from each other. Thanks in advance....

J. Fioretti

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jim Fioretti 

Are the issues you want them to see contained in a single project?

Is it a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project?

Do you have both Team Managed and Company Managed projects active in your system?

If the issues are all in a Company Managed project, this article explains how to give permissions to a group of users for read-only access on a single project.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/New-to-Jira-articles/How-to-give-a-user-read-only-access-to-a-single-project-and/ba-p/1010143

Note this doesn't apply to Team Managed projects.

If you have Team Managed projects in your system also, you will need to modify the permissions on those to Private to block the users from seeing their content.

If the issues you want the vendor to see are in a Team Managed project, and you have Company Managed projects active in your system, then the process is different.

[Jim Fioretti]

The JIRA Kanban project is team managed. I'm wanting to restrict certain users external to my organization from only adding/modifying Kanban information and not any JIRA tickets. I'm not seeing how I can restrict this access. Should I change permissions on a user level, or add all of these users to a unique group then adjust permissions for that group?

Thanks

[Trudy Claspill]

This page discusses managing access to Team Managed projects:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/manage-how-people-access-your-team-managed-project/

A consideration with granting access to one Team Managed project and not others is that the access for all your Team Managed projects needs to be checked. If any of the other Team Managed projects are set to Open or Limited access, then anybody who has access to your Jira instance will be able to view the content of those projects. If you want to prevent the vendor personnel from seeing those other projects, you will need to change the Access on those other projects to Private, and ensure everybody who needs access to those projects still have access to them.

I'm a bit unclear by what you mean about allowing the users to add/modify on "Kanban information" and not any Jira tickets". Can you explain that in more detail?

An agile board (Kanban or Scrum) is just a way to visualize and manipulate issues that exist in a project. You can't really restrict users to interfacing with the issues only through a Kanban display.

Note also that each vendor team member who is granted access to your Jira instances is going to increase your subscription user count, and increase your subscription fees.

[Jim Fioretti]

OK, let me see if I can clarify the item below….we have a JIRA instance that manages Tickets between us and our vendor. The vendor logs/modifies tickets using a utility called "ConnectAll"  that bridges across our two instances. So we have one instance, the Vendor has another and that’s how we manage our tickets. They are independent of each other. Now we want to run a Kanban project on our instance, therefore having the Vendor directly access our instance. We need to be sure they can only see/modify the Kanban board and nothing else in our instance.

 Does that help you?

[Trudy Claspill]

The issues you want the vendor to be able to see will need to be isolated in a project of their own.

If it is a Team Managed project and you have other Team Managed projects in your instance, you are going to have to make sure that the Access settings for those other Team managed projects are set to Private so that the vendor users will not be able to see those other projects. If you have to make that change to those other projects, other people within your company might lose access to those projects if they (or user groups to which they belong) were not already explicitly granted access to those projects.

If you also have Company Managed projects, you are going to have to check the Permission Schemes used in those projects to see how they allocate the Browse Projects permission. That is the permission that makes the contents of Company Managed projects visible to others.

When you add the vendor users as Users in your instance, they will need to be added to a user group and granted access to your Jira Software application (which will consume another license per vendor user). Typically, all internal users of the instance get added to an over-arching user group named something like jira-software users. And often in the Permission Schemes for Company Managed projects the Browse Projects permission is granted either to that group or to the category "Application access (Any logged in user)". If either of those is true in your case, then the Permission Schemes for the Company Managed projects and the user group to which the vendor users are assigned will have to be adjusted.

I'll reiterate that the Kanban board is just a way to view and manipulate the issues. For Team Managed projects, the Kanban board displays all the issues in the referenced project. The vendor users will be able to see all the issues in that project, and will be able to access the details view for those issues.

Additionally, as licensed users of your instance, they will be able to look at the Projects list and Boards lists and the Saved Filters lists for your instance and at least see the names of all other projects and boards in your instance.

[Jack Brickey]

So if you want a user to see issues on a kanban board then they need browse permissions. Now once you give them browse permissions they can see them outside of the kanban board. However this really should not be an issue whether I’m looking at an issue on a kanban board or I’m looking at the detail issue;  it’s all the same thing. If you want to restrict what issues they can see within a project then you need to implement issue security scheme. Check out the documentation for details on this.

[Jim Fioretti]

Thank you.