Does anyone know if it?s possible to automatically share a story card with external team members
Asked by Alicia:

We would like to know if it possible to leverage rules automation to share a card with external team members. Currently we do not have the ability to pass cards to their boards. They are in the process on building their boards. In the meantime we are leveraging additional assigned to grant external members access to add comments to story cards in flight, but found they did not have access to the card although they had received the notification. Adding them to our board is not an option. We will need the additional assignees to provide milestone documentation and/or comments. We wanted to share the card automatically with the listed team members in additional assignees field to prevent the assignee from forgetting this step and log the sharing in the comments. Once the 1st card is created and status = "Done" the status change will trigger the creation of the next card on a scheduled date and repeating the external share.


Answers:
author: Julian Governale
body: There are not too many good options here without providing them access but let me propose a few. I haven't tested option 1 or 2, and we went with option 3 in a similar scenario.

++**Automation Email**++

1. Create an automation rule that will trigger based on your criteria and have an action that sends an email to the external partner. You'll want to cc the issue assignee which allows the external partner to reply back which will also go to the assignee of the ticket so they should receive the updates and documents. The assignee will need to manually copy that into the ticket most likely.

In the body of the email, provide the information needed, including the smart values of the custom fields you want to send. This won't provide them access though so they still won't be able to comment if they need to  
[Jira smart values - issues \| Cloud automation Cloud \| Atlassian Support](https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-issues/)

++**Mail Handler \& Automation Email**++

2. Set up a new mail handler in your system that will point to your project. Set a default reporter (i.e. automation for jira) as the external partners will not be able to set as a reporter on these tickets via this mail handler since they don't have access.

Create an automation email that is triggered on your criteria (option 1) and in the email action, add the smart value {{issue.key}} to the subject of your email so there is a valid key in the emails subject. Add the mail handler email address to the reply-to address in the email action. This may allow the external partners to email updates back into the system.

You should be able to configure the mail handler to only add comments to issues so no issues are created

[Create issues and comments from email \| Atlassian Support](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-issues-and-comments-from-email/)

**++Issue level security++**   
3. Provide them access to the system and project. **Ensure that their account can only access the specific project first.** Configure issue-level security on the project so the external team is restricted to see only the issue where their account is in the "additional assigned to" field.

This keeps your project secure and only provides the necessary permissions. this allows the external team member(s) to see the issue and add a comment if they are in a role limited to those permissions.

This does add a user to your system so you may incur cost, but this is a secure way to get them in without exposing the rest of the projects or issues.

My company was the same way, no external users in our system until i explained issue level security and how it works which met our compliance and privacy team's needs and allowed us to add an external for a similar situation.

[Configure issue security schemes \| Atlassian Support](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-issue-security-schemes/)


Tags: cloud