Customer portal app

Embed your Jira Service Management customer portal in Microsoft Teams and let your customers quickly raise new requests without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Open

Configuration Jira Cloud

Open

Jira admin settings

Go to “Apps” → “Microsoft Teams for Jira” → ”Teams settings” → “Customer portal” tab.

Click on “Create new portal app”.

Options & explanations

1. Custom app compatibility mode

In case you are using apps that rely on a custom UI in the portal, turn on this option to open the final step (creating the request) in a browser pop-up window in Teams.

2. Create customer users on demand

In case you don’t sync all your customer users automatically from Microsoft Azure AD, there might be cases where a Teams user does not have a customer user yet.

By default, we will create a new customer user on demand, the first time a user accesses the portal from Microsoft Teams. In case you don’t want this, turn this option off.

3. Collect CSAT

(=Customer Satisfaction Score)

This option can only be used when chat notifications are available and set for the respective service desk in your Teams settings (mandatory).

By toggling this option on, you will be able to collect feedback after a request has been (successfully) solved.

4. Disable ‘shared with’ field

Toggling this option on, it will hide the ‘shared with’ field from your create request screen. However, it will be displayed when opening up existing requests under ‘my requests’.

5. Disable knowledge base article suggestions

Whenever a new request is raised, our app automatically refers to your knowledge base articles to provide a possible solution to their current problem. Probably the ticket won’t be raised in the first place as the user maybe has found an adequate solution in an article.

However, if you prefer to not see any knowledge base article suggestions in your customer portal, you can activate this option.

6. Native portal look and feel

In case your users expect the portal to look more similar to the original web-based portal (e.g. portal icons, description texts & announcement banners), you can use this option to configure it.

After enabling it, you’ll need to create a new API key, so we can sync the customizations from the web portal. We recommend creating a service user with access to the portal (e.g. portal-customization@yourcompany.com) and create the API token using this user.

Chat notifications

When creating a new MS Teams chat in a JSM ticket, you can choose to post updates about the request into the issue-related chat incl. CSAT collection (see screenshot above).

Technically, it is our customer portal app which acts like a bot here (e.g. IT Support portal) and thus, “posts” updates on the issue in the respective MS Teams chat.

This is how it looks on the Microsoft Teams side (e.g. when an issue is successfully resolved incl. CSAT):

Prerequisites

• The customer portal app needs to be installed first in Microsoft Teams. Just then you can enable notifications (see below “set up”).

• Our notifications bot can also be used to Jira Software/business projects. Learn more here.

Check out these links before moving on:

• Please refer to the “Distributed / company-wide installation” section on this page

• Local installations (“sideloading”) will not work for testing the chat notifications feature. The app must be available via your organizations app catalog.

Set-up

When installing the bot into one of your customer portals, it sends request updates into the respective MS Teams chat, keeping the reporter in the loop about their ticket.

The bot sends information any time there are changes made to the ticket (e.g. chats started, meetings scheduled etc.).

Jira Server & Data Center

Deployment / Rollout

To deploy the app (.zip-file) you just downloaded from the configuration page (see above), you have different options.

Option 1: Local installation

To test the app locally, you can upload it directly from Microsoft Teams. It may be possible that your company has disabled installing apps, so you may need the help of a Microsoft 365 administrator in your company.

Option 2: Distributed / company-wide installation

If you finished testing and want to provide the app to your end-users, you have different options to do this. Usually, you’ll need the help of a Microsoft Teams administrator to use the following distribution options.

1. Via Microsoft Teams company-wide app (manual)

2. Via Microsoft Teams admin policy (automated)

In case you want to make sure that a certain set or all users actually have installed the app by default - e.g. to increase visibility - you can also do this.

Troubleshooting

App not appearing for all or certain users

As the app is considered a “custom app”, certain restrictions in your Microsoft Teams admin center might apply. Make sure you have allowed custom apps and the app permission policy actually allows custom apps - you are also able to only allow this app in particular, in case you don’t want other custom apps to run.

A good point to start is the Manage apps section in Teams:

More information can be found in the Microsoft docs:

Overview of app policies to manage apps in Teams - Microsoft Teams

Manage custom app policies and settings - Microsoft Teams

User sees error “customer with email address not found”

See here: Customer user authentication error

Cloud Limitations

There are a few limitations to be aware of, due to the nature of the app. As we cannot just embed the official Jira Service portal in Teams, it’s a custom app that tries to mimic the normal customer portal as closely as possible.

Custom fields

We currently support many custom fields that you can configure to your Jira Service Management portal view. As it’s a manual effort for certain kinds of fields, we do not support all possible fields out of the box. In case the screen to create a new request is missing any crucial fields, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, we’ll try to add the field in an upcoming version.

Third party app compatibility

Another limitation of re-building the functionality is the missing app support. In case you do have custom apps from the Atlassian Marketplace to extend your customer portal, unfortunately we can’t show the app in Teams. We are in early evaluation of supporting certain apps, but in the meantime, please use the “Compatibility mode” toggle in the Jira configuration page for a workaround. Instead of opening the form in Teams itself, a click on the request type in the app will then open in the users browser, where they will be able to complete the request.

Customer single-sign-on using email address

As of today, Atlassian does not provide a good way of authenticating / identifying customers externally. To avoid having customer users go trough a weird workaround of a login flow, we decided to start with a simple single-sign-on, based on the users email address. In most cases, this should just work out of the box, e.g. when the users email address in Outlook / Microsoft 365 is the same as in Jira.

However, there might be certain cases (e.g. email aliases, hybrid setups), where the email address does not match. Please see our dedicated troubleshooting article (Customer user authentication error) or reach out to our support!