Many of you have asked for a faster, easier way for your customers to get help. That’s why we’re rolling out a login-free portal that lets them send requests and read help articles without creating another login. (If you need a more private portal, don’t worry - you can still do that, too).

What do my customers see?

If you use a login-free portal, customers can discover your portal and its help articles via search engines. To send a request, they fill out a form and provide an email address to track the request. The rest of the process works like email support: they get a confirmation email from your service desk, can correspond with agents over email, and get updates on the request status. They can still finish creating an account in the portal to track the request, but it's not necessary.

What do agents see?

On the issue view, agents see the new request channel type Anonymous Portal. (Hint: you can search for this using JQL ). To protect against phishing, a new automation rule comments on the issue to let agents know the request came from someone who wasn’t logged in (you can turn this off if you like):

The login-free portal also protects against spam requests by using invisible reCAPTCHA.

How does it work?

The portal settings are controlled by a combination of global customer permissions and project customer permissions. 

If you want a portal on your JIRA site to be login-free, a JIRA admin needs to allow login-free portals at the global level. Then, project admins can choose whether to use a login-free portal, or restrict the portal to people their team adds to the project. Learn more about permissions.

How do I get started?

To start using the login-free portal, follow these steps:

1. In the global settings, a JIRA admin allows login-free portals on the site. This doesn’t automatically turn it on for all the portals, it just makes it an option for projects on the site. 
   To do this, go to  > Products > JIRA Service Desk Configuration > Customer permissions. 
   • For Can customers create their own accounts? choose Yes.
   • For Can customers access and send requests form the help center without logging in? choose Yes.
2. In the project settings, a project admin allows anyone to send requests to the project.
   To do this, go to Project settings () > Customer permissions (or Project settings () > Channels > Customer permissions in next-gen projects).
• For Who can access the portal and send requests to %your_site_name%?, choose Anyone.
3. If you want customers to be able to read your knowledge base without logging in and find articles via search engines, verify your knowledge base settings.
   To do this, go to Project settings () > Knowledge base.
   • For Access > Viewing, make sure Anyone can read articles is selected.

Learn more

How we updated the permissions settings for the login-free portal

More about global customer permissions

More about project customer permissions