I tried the Zendesk JIRA plugin. It did not work, but their support is active, so can probably fight through the bugs.
Seems like the options are:

• Try to fight through the zendesk <-> JIRA integration bugs. Risk is, may never really work correctly. Also, need JIRA support to remove the Zendesk plugin, because it alters loads of aspects of JIRA.
• Migrate to Zendesk
• Wait for JIRA to deliver. Maybe never.
• Migrate to another solution, like Request Tracker. I'm testing that. Seems pretty good.

I have same issue. Small company, lots of customers. We would never have installed this solution if we'd realised this basic functionality was missing. We're now transitioning away from using JIRA and are actively looking for a better option. I'll look at zendesk now - thanks for the tip+

Still no answer on this - it's costing my business money not to have a service desk where you can send notifications back to issue reporters that aren't actual users of JIRA.

Tired of waiting - anyone got an opinion on Zendesk? https://www.zendesk.com/product/tour

Looks like I can pay the same amount of money as I do for Service Desk, except I get a full service desk product...?

Also vote for this issue!

Simple add rights for login users in role "Service Desk Customers" to customer portal.
If user not in group "users" then its can't login to jira and to Service Desk Customers Portal.

Good solution divide Service Desk Customers Potal and Jira login mechanism.

Many small company have big clients. Good service to client add all its users to system.
Best way to create another register system for customer portal (jira in private mode, customer portal in public mode).

I can't buy 500+ users license, but after you fix my issue i promise buy Service Desk for 50 users!

I recognise Atlassian as a company has to make its own decisions about licensing and priorities for development. So the following is my suggestion only.

Service Desk looks really awesome but the licensing doesn't allow it to become an outward facing support environment.

We now pay $10 for Jira and $10 per year for maintenance. I would be happy to pay a lot more than that for 10 users. However we have in excess of 200 customers so we would have to pay at least $14,000 for Jira + Service Desk (I'm not sure how this would work with Jira Agile). There's just no way we could find that sort of money. We could easily end up with 10,000 customers in a couple of years time – the vast majority of whom would ask one question and never have to come back again. But we'd have to keep the license open for them because they might.

So I'd vote for an (maybe even significant) increase in the 10 user license fee if it meant we could get access to Service Desk with unlimited use for customers.

Sent here by support.
It does not make sense to price licenses at the same amount for "stub users" who only create tickets and for "support agents" who field the tickets. This pricing model is so backward and unprecedented in the issue tracking industry that I didn't even think to check it out when I made the purchase. This is a new product, so I'm hoping Atlassian will reconsider their monetization strategy here and bring it into reach of organizations with sub-five-figure budgets.

If Atlassian really wants Service Desk to get the right attention, sales as well as replace a lot of other ticketing solutions, they would have to give client accounts un-related to the user tier licensing. I don't think calling it an 'internal service desk' solves the problem. You wouldn't need SLAs for servicing internal issues, especially for small companies. The licensing model is really ridiculous. I hope Atlassian does something about this soon because we really want to use JIRA Service Desk instead of our current service desk.

I guess the main problem is that JIRA Service Desk would need to match JIRA license tier plus all JIRA Plugins. That's really ridiculous.

The customer portal is already there, so we just need customer accounts who will only have access to that customer portal, their reported issues and comments related to those issues. I think it's doable

This needs to be implemented. It is not possible for me to purchase a license for users that might send in a support request for a new keyboard once a year.

Directed here by Atlassian helpdesk....

It looks like Service Desk is missing something crucial: the ability for external users to submit requests via email and JIRA generate an acknowledgement back. I've read the discussions in the forum, including the (frankly utterly unhelpful) Atlassian responses that everyone needs to be a registered user to get notifications, or that Service Desk is only engineered to be for internal teams, or that there are plugins that get around this issue (that aren't available to OnDemand JIRA).
At the very least what I need is to be able to see the original requester's email in the JSON payload to the Create Issue webhook, and I can take it from there.
Ideally, I'd like to see Service Desk built out with this anonymous notification feature ASAP - as it stands it's not a viable service desk offering at all.

This is NOT A NICE-TO-HAVE, this is the difference between us building out our service offering around JIRA or around a competitor product. If I have to leave JIRA for a 10-year-old PHP app I'll not be happy....

Not sure if anyone has read this: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/11/insight-jira-service-desks-pricing-model/

i'm in the same boat as many here - we run a small company and to pay license costs (at current prices) per customer is absurd to the point of silly for us - i do prefer the idea of a new class of JIRA user called client/customer that can only login via the Service Desk/Customer Portal interface and can only create tickets/view tickets there etc with no other JIRA features/functionality

The UI is smart, and the overall solution is so much better than zendesk and others, it just needs to get this licensing issue sorted out

to call this a minor priority given the stink raised on review pages/blog posts etc feels like a kick in the teeth to be frank

Can someone change priority on this

Same input as so many others. The Jira SD 1 star rating on Atlassian marketplace definitely says something ... I couldn't find a review where the pricing model problem isn't mentioned. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.servicedesk My note to Edwin Wong in October after the Jira SD announcement including some suggested alternative models:

Please see my comment here:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/SERVICEDESK/How+JIRA+and+JIRA+Service+Desk+Work+Together?focusedCommentId=411109298#comment-411109298
(edit - looks like the licensing related comments were deleted from this page and a link to the blog post was added - way to mute the customers, Atlassian. :| )

Along with many others it sounds like, we don't want to pay for a full Atlassian seat across all our atlassian products for a user that will ONLY be looking at the service desk view. I think it's a perfectly reasonable assumption for such a limited use. The trouble is, the core functionality of service desk is a simplified view for submitting normal tickets - it isn't exactly game-changing functionality like you could argue for Agile or Confluence or other features.

One solution would be to create a special user group of type service desk portal user, and they cannot access the rest of Jira - just the service portal, a dashboard, and basic reports without all the fancy agile development views. Then allow Jira admins to create those users for no additional cost. We're already having to pay extra for our existing team to use the service desk functionality on top of jira.

While I'd strongly prefer portal users are not an additional cost, I understand you want to increase your revenue beyond just a small number of seats on an IT team. This would still be tough for our budget, but here is one suggestion: Break from your traditional Atlassian model by allowing a company to purchase a larger set of users for JUST the service desk instead of the usual "The License Type and Edition (number of users) must match your existing JIRA license."

In our case, we're looking into purchasing a 25 user license to cover our expanding IT & development team, but we will not have the budget to purchase the 100 user license across all Atlassian tools to cover all employees in the company. Perhaps customers would be more willing to purchase the larger number of seats for the service desk portion of the price only.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Dave

I can only second this , the service desk would be perfect for us, but only with external access that doesnt require licenses for a full account.
We can not afford to buy full licenses for a user base that might file an issue once every x-months. ...

Would love to see a change in this !

I'm with the request starter.

I/We have a starter JIRA and STASH install (10 users) but probably 100s of "customers" who will or want to send in feature requests or bugs. Problem is, that most of my/our projects are non-profit or paid (but not full, just some little cash-ins) by e.g. google ads or some kind of donations. So i/we can't just buy a 500 users license.

There should be some new features like:

• Make the customer portal available, even when the project or JIRA system is set to private mode, so customers can also enter bugs/stopper/fqs and so on (looks like it's not possible at the moment) but not enter JIRA or e.g. STASH itself.
• Dual mode for licensing customers
  • Licensing free / Cost free posibility of customers to use customers portal. Customers can just enter an emailaddress and their name (and probably some kinde of contact information) and will receive something like a ticket number and a "code" via email to enter modifications or additional informations like some "classic" ticketing systems do. But there is no real registration.
  • Licensing with costs when customers should have the ability to register themselfs (and stay in system) and see their whole request history and can enter modifications or additional informations without ticket # and code.

So as for the Dual licensing mode, if you have a SaaS for example, you can use the 2nd (licensing cost mode) to connect your billing program with the service desk to automatically import users from/to service desk to billing program and vice versa or implement the customer portal into your normal website (in which way ever, don't know the abilities service desk has, like API or so on).

If this would come, i'll kick my zendesk account and step over to JIRA service desk.

As per the many other reviewers and requests, I would say that this is very much needed.
I would change the priority of this issue to Critical, to add it to JSD asap, so that many other Atlassian customers can start using the plugin and contribute to its development with suggestions/ideas/feedback.

So guys, what is your plan? Do you plan to implement this in the next 1-2 months or something?