Issue Permissions for External Users

[Jeremy West]

We have Kanban boards set up for all our projects, where project managers will enter all the tasks etc. that are required to be completed. Using labels, these are then pushed into the development teams agile boards where they work through the tasks as required.

We are engaging some external developers for certain projects where we are at capacity with internal developers. I have created a single user for the contractor, and a new agile project specific to the contractor.

I want to be able to assign tasks from the project kanban boards to the contractor and in-turn they appear in the contracts board. In turn, preventing them from seeing all our other projects. 

It seems, to make this work I need to edit the permission scheme and give the contractor group access to browse the project and issues, which in-turn obviously gives them visibility of the project even if they are not in entered onto the people access page.

Just wondering if anyone might have some tips on how to achieve this so the contractor can see assigned tasks in their project, from other projects without seeing the parent project?

[Tom Lister · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jeremy West 

Have you looked into Security Levels in Jira

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver073/configuring-issue-level-security-861253265.html

You should be able to set access for 

• Internal Staff
• internal Staff and Contractors

Ask if you need more details.

Tom

[Jeremy West]

@Tom Lister yeah this was my first port of call, I've not used the issue security before, gave it a shot but it did not seem to make any difference.

In theory, this would work as I could give them project access but only allow them to see assigned issues. I might have another crack.

[Thomas Bürkli]

We are currently facing the same challenge:

-we have "internal" project with all of our issues

- we have a "contractor" project with a board, containing a subset of issues from the "internal" project (filtering done via label)

How can we give access the contractors so that they can see the issues included in the "contractor" board (but do not have access to the "internal" project)?

Thanks in advance for your help

Thomas

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Hey @Thomas Bürkli

as @Tom Lister said, that's the use case for issue security schemes/levels. In short, I'd recommend some approach like this:

1. Create an issue security scheme
2. Add a security level "internal"
3. Set the default security level in the scheme to "internal"
4. Add all your internal users to the "internal" security level
5. Assign the scheme to your project
6. Now, every new issue will get the security level "internal" and won't be visible to your contractor until you remove the security level so that it's also visible to them.
7. As a last step, you'd need to add your contractor to the project and giving them the permissions they should have using the project permissions. These permissions will be then valid for all issues they have access to via the security scheme.

Does this help?

Cheers,
Matthias.

[Thomas Bürkli]

Hi @Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ ,

Thanks for the clarifications, now it is clear to me.

Best regards

Thomas

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Hi @Jeremy West,

if I understood correctly, you'd like to manage all tasks for your subcontractor in another project, right?

I could see two other possible ways (besides the security levels @Tom Lister mentioned):

• As soon as you want to assign issues to them, you could move the task to their project where they can see their tasks.
  In order to still see it on your internal board, you can configure your kanban board filter so that it shows issues from both projects.
• Another solution would be to setup an issue sync app. This way you could keep everything inside your project (and board) and could decide which tasks you want to sync to the subcontractor's project. The subcontractor can work in his project as he wants to and all changes will be reflected to your internal project.
  You would be in control what fields you want to synchronize - so you could choose to not sync some internal fields.
  I'm working for the team behind Backbone Issue Sync - you could check our docs for a description of your use case.

Cheers,
Matthias.