Inquiry About Setting Up and Managing External User Projects in Jira
Asked by Kevin Lu:

Dear Jira Experts,

Today, my manager assigned me the task of creating a project for external users (users from another organization). I am inquiring if Jira could fulfill the following requirements:

1. We will create a project for this organization and enroll its users in this project. The users should only see this project on their dashboard.
2. This project will have its own project managers (a list of selected users) and ordinary users (who can create and complete issues).
3. For Contacts under Assets on the dashboard, this organization's users should only access their users and not see users outside their organization.
4. In the organization's project, we (the company I am working for that owns the Jira) should also be able to manage this organization's project and its tickets, even though we are in a different group (because we are another organization).
5. For account creation, this organization's managers should not be able to create new accounts for their users. Only we (Jira owners) can create new accounts upon the organization's managers' request.

Please let me know if the above five points are possible.

Thank you!


Answers:
author: Trudy Claspill
body: Hello [@Kevin Lu](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5403433)

#1 In order to limit the users to seeing only that one project you will need to review the Permission Schemes associated with all your other projects and ensure that the external users are not assigned to any User Group that has been granted the Browse Projects permission and that the Browse Projects permission is not granted to Public or Any Logged In User.

If the Browse Projects permissions are allocated only to Project Roles and the users are never assigned to Roles in the other projects, then they should be able to see only their own project.

You may have to change the existing Permission Schemes to achieve this.

#2 This can be addressed by assigning the users to Project Roles within the project.

#3 I have not worked with Assets before so I cannot address this point.  
However there is a Global Permission called Browse Users. The external users will need this permission to see other users of their own group in User Picker lists like Assignee, Reporter, and Watchers. But they will also be able to see all users in your system in User Picker fields and when trying to use "@" to mention another user within a Jira issue.

#4 In order to ensure your own access to the project you will have to be assigned to groups or roles that have been granted permissions to the project through that project's Permission Scheme.

#5 If you don't give Jira Administrator permissions to any members of that external user group, then they should not be able to create new user accounts.

comments: author: Kevin Lu
body: Dear Trudy,

Thank you for your very informative reply. For Point 3, is there a way to restrict the external users so they cannot see our organization's users' information?


author: Trudy Claspill
body: In my experience that would require ensuring that the external users do not have the global Browse Users permission, which would affect **ALL** user picker fields and user mentioning functionality.

There is no way to limit those users to being able to see only people in their own user group or who have access to their project. It is an all or nothing situation. There is a change request about being able to limit the users available in mentions and System user picker fields:

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-36896>


author: Nicolas Grossi
body: [@Kevin Lu](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5403433) What do you actually mean by "External user project" ?

Nicolas

comments: author: Kevin Lu
body: Dear Nicolas,

External user project is the project that is going to be used by our external partner's users, they are not our employees in our organization. Currently, only our organization's users use Jira. We're thinking of having our external partner's users to use our Jira's project because there will be a collaboration.

One of the requirement is they must not be able to see our organization's users, only a selected users from our organization the external users can see and contact.


Tags: contacts

data-center

external-users

issue

jira-data-center

project