Managing collaborators

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Collaborators are JIRA users that occasionally assist agents with customer requests by making internal comments. For example, developers who help support staff analyze a bug and add an internal comment that explains the cause and any available workarounds could be made collaborators. A collaborator consumes one JIRA user license.

Collaborators can:
  • View issues, comments and attachments
  • Add and delete their own attachments
  • Add and delete their own internal comments 
  • Watch and vote for issues
Collaborators cannot:
  • Be assigned to issues
  • Log work on and transition issues
  • Comment externally to customers
  • View the service desk interface (e.g. queues, reports)

On this page:

Best practices 

Collaborators should create issues in their own project (outside of the service desk project) to track internal or long running work. This allows the team of collaborators to assign and log work on issues and use their own workflow for resolving their own issues. For example, when a support team runs into an application bug, this bug should be created as an issue in the development team's project. The development team can then use tools like JIRA Agile to allocate the bug into a sprint and see it through to an update in the application. Separating customer issues with internal ones also allows the support team to link multiple support tickets to the single underlying bug, avoiding duplication for the development team.

Examples of agents and collaborators working together on requests

Application support example

Diane, an application support team member (agent), loops in Tony, a developer (collaborator) using @mention to ask him for advice on an exception in a log file. Tony takes a look at the issue in JIRA, views the attached log file and posts an internal comment for Diane with his analysis. After that, Diane, as the assigned agent, conveys the findings to the customer to resolve the issue.

IT service desk example

Martin, an IT service desk team member (agent), links an incident ticket with an underlying network problem ticket for the network ops team in a regular JIRA project. Andrew, a network ops team member, assigns this network issue to himself and starts working on it. After fixing the network problem, Andrew navigates to the linked incident in the IT service desk and leave an internal comment (collaborator) for Martin, asking Martin to try the network connection again. Seeing the comment, Martin verifies and tells the customer that the problem is resolved.

Adding a collaborator to a service desk

  1. In the service desk, go to the People tab > Collaborators section. Click Add collaborator

  2. Follow the prompts, search for the user you want to add and then add the user to your service desk. 
    If you cannot find the user from the search, it means that the user does not have a user account in the system. You can only add existing JIRA users as collaborators. You can create the user in JIRA. Note that you must be a JIRA administrator to create users.

Last modified on Jun 15, 2015

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