Sending and receiving emails from non JIRA users

[Neil Green]

Hello,

I am wondering if anyone can help me in determining if the below is possible on JIRA cloud.

I am an avid user of JIRA and Confluence but unfortunately I am not an IT or Tech user. I havent been able to get much help from my internal IT and was therefore hoping that with the help of the community I could solve the problem anyway.

If it is possible then I would be really grateful for a step by step (simple person) guide to help!

What I would like to have is the following:

1. A customer, who is a non JIRA account holder can send me an email as a request for quote or information.

2. I can allocate that a JIRA key, provide the quote / information etc. and send that via email.

3. The customer can confirm the quote / information etc. and the response will be linked to the original task / key.

Almost everything in our business runs through JIRA (and confluence) and solving this element would make the operation much more efficient and avoid lots of duplicated effort.

The key difficulty seems to be in the email sender / recipients not being JIRA users, I have found that emails can be received from JIRA users but that doesnt help in this situation.

Any help gratefully received.

Neil

[John Funk]

Hi Neil,

I would suggest that you add the Jira Service Management product to your instance. Then you can set up a portal with a form for the external users to fill out (which can guide them to give you all of the information you need up front), or you can have them send an email. Either way will create an issue in Jira. 

Then you can add a comment to the issue which will send an email to the person who created the issue (i.e. the Reporter). And the reporter can reply to the email they receive (or go directly to the Jira issue) which will add their response as a comment. That way everything is on the issue itself and you don't need to chase down email threads. 

[Neil Green]

Thank you John,

In reviewing this I believe that:

1. I would incur an extra cost of $675 per month. The processing of the emails is only a tiny part of what the business uses JIRA for, I believe that in using Service Management  that I would have to buy licences for all my JIRA users as all users of JIRA would need to have visibility.

2. I am unsure as to whether the Service Management integrates directly into our bigger instance of JIRA Software which I would need to happen to allow this piece of work to integrate into the wider use of JIRA in the business.

 - but that fact notwithstanding I dont think I can justify $8000 per annum for this feature - is there a workaround?

Neil

[John Funk]

No, you should be able to add a Free JSM product subscription to your instance for up to 3 users. No customer using the email or portal needs a license. 

Existing Jira users should be able to add comments without needing a JSM license. If you want users to add values to fields or transition the issue, then they would need a JSM license. 

JSM and Jira Software are already "integrated" in that they are built on the same foundation. 

I would say just add the free JSM product and give it a try. 

[Neil Green]

Hello John,

The JIRA Service Desk instance sits there as a separate entity to my JIRA software.

There is no obvious way that I can link anything between the 2 "programs" - they each seem to act individually.

That is in the case where I am one of the 3 x licence holders.

For the 4th person it will not even give them access.

I take it there isnt a way of doing what I originally asked?

Are there any 3rd party add ons that might address my problem?

Neil

[John Funk]

You can simply link the tickets/issues in one product/project (really just different Project Types if that helps to understand it a little better) to the other product/project. 

Outside of using JSM, the customer must have a Jira license.