Multi-Brand Support

[James Skinner]

Hi,

I currently use ZenDesk with various automations and triggers setup for multiple companies. I will give a few examples below. However, ZenDesk is no longer meeting our requirements and we need to move to an ITSM based approach.

Company A - different support email address, different portal, different KB.

Company B - support email address, portal and KB.

Both companies SHOULD NOT be able to see each others portals, and can only log tickets via the portal or email address.

Each company upon creating tickets will get different email notifications, such as Regards, Company A Support.... Regards, Company B Support - if you need more info call 39494-404 etc.

Would this be possible with Jira? I like how it handles P1, On-Call Managers etc. 

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Hi @James Skinner ,

• I would also recommend the use of Jira Service Management. Based on your requirements though, there is an open request in progress to allow custom domains in cloud apps (like Service Management :

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

• Although it's not supported yet:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/confeval/jira-service-management-evaluator-resources/jira-service-management-customize-your-portal-url

• More documentation can be found here:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicemanagement/jira-service-management-documentation-408453917.html

• This is related to customer notifications and email templates:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-notifications-for-your-customers-and-team/

• You should create different Service Management projects, and link them to their respective Confluence Space as Knowledge Bases:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/use-confluence-as-a-knowledge-base-218275154.html

• Regarding customized asset manager, you can create custom fields (e.g. dropdown lists) where there are options for each project.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-a-custom-field/

• Make sure you add the field to the screen used by your project:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/add-a-custom-field-to-a-screen/

• You can have different list of options by creating different contexts, as explained here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/add-a-context-to-a-custom-field/

Hope it helps,

[James Skinner]

Hi,

Ah, I see. That is a big issue for us, we need custom URLs for all our companies we maintain. 

Does the server hosting allow this, and if so any drawbacks?

Thanks

[Carlos Garcia Navarro]

Well, I wouldn't look into the server option at this moment as Atlassian is ending the sale and support of server licenses in 2021 and 2024 respectively (https://www.atlassian.com/migration/journey-to-cloud?tab=server-key-changes).

Regarding the change request to allow custom URLs, they wrote that they're going to re-evaluate and probably announce the decision sometime in the beginning of the year. Maybe we hear good news here :-).  I'd recommend to vote for the feature under https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Just to weigh in on the Server discontinuation, don't forget there is still Datacenter which is also self hosted but clustered.

You can always run a single node cluster and you'd still have the same as with Server just with a Subscription based license instead of perpetual.

With regards to the custom url I understand the importance but I still see it as a problem with 2 facets.

1. Do you require a real masking of the url so that the customer never sees "yourname.atlassian.net" or
2. does it just need to be reachable through support.mycompany.com and a redirect is also fine? You could perfectly set up a vhost/redirect in your dns.

so for me the url issue depends on how much coverage you need initially for the url to be masked.

Otherwise like @Walter Buggenhout and @Carlos Garcia Navarro  mention JSM seems like a great fit for you with multiple projects/multiple portals and all the other features/requirements you mention.

The "problem" you are experiencing that every user sees all the projects is most likely just a permission issue. It's an out of the box feature and best practice to hide/restrict what the user shouldn't see so that's not an issue.

[James Skinner]

Hi,

It would be number 1, we need proper masking and different URLs per project such as support.company1.com and support.company2.com etc.

We'd then need an on call manager for P1 alerts if they are raised it will email the on call manager and if he does not respond then email and send an SMS to everyone.

I have been playing around today in my spare time and it looks really complex! Do you have any guides available, which include the changing of the domain as at the moment it is like team-24ru91249812.atlassian.net - would be nice if I can have it as midlandsupport.atlassian.net (with the add-on someone showed me in here changing that)?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @James Skinner,

Jira Service Management should be able to support you in those areas. It is not obvious to explain all the bits and pieces, but the platform is based on ITIL principles, supports the workflows of classic ITSM processes (incident, change, service request and problem management) out of the box. As it's built in the Jira platform, it offers you easily customisable and very powerful workflow features as well.

The separation of customer portals is done through setting up separate projects, which can indeed be secured apart from one another. And each portal (project) can have its own email address for email based ticketing.

Knowledge bases can be managed through Confluence and integrate nicely in the request process. Yet again, each project can have its own separated KB.

The recent rebrand of Jira Service Desk  to Jira Service Management (November last year) bundled quite a lot of extra functionality into the product. With reference to one of your other questions, OpsGenie is now part of the product and offers on call schedules. etc, etc, etc, ...

You could start by reading more about features, pricing, resources and more over here. 

[James Skinner]

Thanks for your quick reply. It sounds good, however I have been looking at the System Settings and I was expecting a lot more settings that I have discovered. 

I have created multiple projects - Hospital 1, Hospital 2, etc. However, I am not too sure how to isolate them from one another - I go to our support address and the customer can pick any. I do not want this, do you have a guide please?

Please could you send me like an admin (advanced) guide? I have checked the link you sent but that is just an overview of what it can do.

I need to know:

- How to send different email templates per project.

- How to isolate each project from one another.

- How to design KB for each project.

- Change the default URL to support.ourcompany.co.uk

- Can you do asset management and can requesters request certain devices, such as a desk phone etc.

Thanks

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi James,

Yes, certainly. I wasn't sure from your question at what stage you were in your exploration, so I sent you the starting point to learn more. But you can find elaborate documentation online as well.

Some specific sections that may be of interest based on your questions:

• Getting started / admin guide 
• Setting permissions 
• Managing requests via email 
• Asset management through Insight (announcement) 
• KB configuration 

That will be a lot of information to digest, I'm sure. But I hope it helps!

kr,

Walter

[Walter Buggenhout]

About the custom URL, @Carlos Garcia Navarro is right about the outstanding feature request and watching/voting for it is definitely something I'd recommend you to do.

If this is of outmost importance to your organisation, there's workarounds for that. A marketplace app like Refined for Jira Cloud e.g. facilitates custom URLs and - on top of that - allows you to fully style and brand your customer portal the way you want.

[James Skinner]

Thanks. Will deffo have a look at this, does it allow for a complete custom URL such support.midland.com goes to portal A and help.hospital.com goes to portal B?

If this is correct, then we will consider Jira :D

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @James Skinner,

If I was in your shoes, I think I would definitely take more functionality related stuff into consideration than just the URL part to make a decision like this ;-).

I am not a technical expert of port forwarding, URL masking and stuff like that. But I do know that each project has its own unique URL. And if that won't do, you could still spin up separate JSM sites to reach the same purpose. How things work exactly with Refined is something you could simply ask the vendor. Contact details for the support team can be found on the Marketplace listing I mentioned earlier.

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Be sure to also read the limitations that are imposed with using Refined.

They might not be relevant or important to you but best to know what is expected :)

https://docs.refined.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=57409886

Having multiple url's linking to different portals should not be an issue as they have an ID in the url which defines what portal you end up in.

Also if you are a customer of portal A and not portal B you will not even see portal B in your overview.