external client access

[sujit kumar]

Hello Jira experts, I am working on setting up jira cloud for my organization and I got a use case where I need your guidance. Kindly assist with the best practices.

I have a client to whom I like to create and Jira project and grant view/create access only where they can submit request, view and add comments to the tickets. 

To accomplish this here is what I am thinking:

1. Create a form and share that link with the client so that they can add tickets thru that form or

2. add the client as a limited user to jira cloud instance and grant them view/create access to a specific project

3. Also create a dashboard to showcase the progress team is making on their project. 

Am I heading in the right direction? Do I need to do something specific when granting access? 

[Trudy Claspill]

I have not worked with the Forms features in Jira Cloud before, so I can't speak to how that might serve your needs.

Are you using both Team Managed and Company Managed projects in your instance? Restricting access takes more steps when you use both.

If you are using only Company Managed projects then you can do what you describe using Permission Schemes for the projects. Note that each client who has access will have to be granted a user license, which will increase your user license total and add to the cost of your subscription.

If you go that route you will have to make sure that the client users are not added to a Jira user group that is given the Browse Projects permission in all projects. You would need to set them up in a separate Jira user group. You might also want to have a separate Jira user group per client so that you can grant permissions on a project to a particular group and know that only that client can see that project.

Note though that the users would be able to do things like go to the list of All Projects, All Boards, or All Filters and see information in those lists that is beyond the scope of the one project you want them to see.

Have you considered using something like Jira Service Management for interfacing with your clients? That would give them the ability to create issues and comment on issues without consuming a user license and and would restric their visibility to either just the issues created by the individual or all the issues in the Organization to which you assign the individual. I'm have not worked with Jira Cloud Service Management much so I don't know what type of dashboards might be available for "customer" consumption in that scenario. You may need a third party app to provide the client with dashboard information.

If you wanted to then manage issues in a Software project for your internal team, you could automate creating a copy of the Service Management issue into your Software project and link the two issues together. And you could automate updating the status of the Service Management issue based on changes to the status of the Software issue. You can also synchronize comments between the linked issues.