Administration Guide

Owned by Hiwad Said (Deactivated)
Last updated: Jan 19, 2022 by Marin Varvodic [venITure] (Deactivated)
6 min read

Installation & Licensing

  1. Log in to your Jira instance as an administrator.

  2. Select the user icon.

  3. From the dropdown menu which appears, choose Atlassian Marketplace. The Find new apps screen will be displayed.

  4. Use the search function to locate Agent Extensions. The correct app version will be shown in the search results.

  5. To start a new trial version, click Try free and to purchase a license for Agent Extensions click Buy now. You will be asked to log in to MyAtlassian. The Agent Extensions app then starts downloading.

  6. After entering your data on MyAtlassian, click on Generate license.

  7. Continue by clicking Apply license. If you're using an older version of UPM, you can copy and paste the license into your Jira instance.

Introduction

Agent Extensions for Jira Service Management is the app for better overview and usability of your Service Desk projects. Let's go through a few of them.

"Customer Domain" custom field

The custom field for the customer domain is configured to always store the "@domain.com" part of the reporters email address. This makes it convenient to use in JQL functions and issue filters, if you want to filter users. To display it in your issues, you need to configure it so that it appears on the screens of your issue views. Follow the steps in the illustration to do this.

NoLogin Portal

To continue our tour through Agent Extensions, you should check the Agent Extensions app configuration page. Just click on the menu icon Administration in the upper right corner and select Manage apps. You will find the Agent Extensions configuration page in the left sidebar. By clicking on it, the layout appears on the right-hand side of the page. 

Steps to enable NoLogin Portal:

  1. Enable NoLogin portal

  2. Select a 'User for NoLogin portal' (Does not need licenses)

  3. At least one Service Desk project has to be configured so that Anyone can email the service desk or raise a request in the portal. Only projects will be shown, where the NoLogin portal user has access to

  4. Project Lead needs Service Desk Agent licenses

Since the customer portal is not accessible without an account, a user needs to be assigned to access the Service Desk pages. This is the only role the user will have; we have ensured that the user has no access to Jira or to their own profile.

In order to create requests on behalf of the NoLogin user, the project lead must be an agent in the Public Service Desk projects. By default, the project lead is used to create the request, but the request reporter is the customer with his/her e-mail address.

Enable Single Sign-on

The functionality Single Sign-on allows the user to login to confluence directly.

Steps to enable single sign:

  1. Jira instance have to be connected with Confluence

  2. Enable Single Sign-on

There are two options to link users directly to the NoLogin portal.

The first option is that the admin can use the target parameter with the value ?target=nologin in the address to open NoLogin immediately.
Example: https://my.servicdesk.portal/servicedesk/customer/portal/1?target=nologin
will open the 'NoLogin portal' directly, avoiding the Login form.

Another option to link the user to the 'NoLogin portal' is the functionality 'Create a custom link '. The admin can generate an URL, so every user who owns the custom link will be able to create a request. The request will be created on behalf of the selected user.

Steps to create a custom link for your service desk:

  1. Click on the drop-down

  2. Choose a user 

  3. Click on 'Generate URL'

  4. The information about the created URL will be shown in the section 'Created custom URL'

By using the custom link any user can log-in to the to the service desk as guest.

Agent Extensions Panel Configuration, Time Spent Panel and Comments

In order to access the Agent Extensions configuration page of a project, select a project and click the 'Project Configuration' button in the lower left corner.

Related issues and time spent have to be configured in the configuration of each project. Therefore, it is possible to configure these panels differently for each project. 

Once you are in the Project Configuration, you can find the 'Agent Extensions Configuration' at the bottom of the sidebar on the left. Click to display the Agent Extensions Configuration page. From here you will see three different tabs at the top: Tabs, Time Spent Panels, Comments.

You can start by activating the first two options in Time Spent Panels tab, the Time Spent panel and the 'Related Issues' panel. This activates the panels for the current project.

Before we can save the configuration, in the Time Spent Panels section of the Configuration panel, change the drop-down boxes from Disabled to any of the Enabled options. This activates each of the time tracking values. The time spent is logged in the Time Spent panel:

  • Domain - based on the Domain custom field

  • Reporter - will find the time spent on issues in which the reporter is the same

  • Account - shows tracked time for the account that is currently logged in.

The Scope defines the range of issues for which the time is calculated. For example, if you select Enabled: (Scope: current project) for On domain, the Time Spent calculates the time spent on all problems that contain the value of the same domain.

Fill in the fields for Name, Description and Filter under 'Configure a Custom Time Spent filter'. A description is not required.

For the JQL filter you can use JQL functions currentProject(), currentIssue() and currentReporter(). This will not work anywhere else.

In the 'Filter logged time by date range' section, you can specify a rolling date range, which always filters the time spent between e.g. -20 days before today, to -5 days before today. This means that if the panel was on 20.5.2019, it would report the time spent between 1.5.2019 and 15.5.2019. If today was 29.5.2019, the panel would report the time spent between 9.5.2019, and 14.5.2019.

Navigate to the 'Tabs' section inside Project settings to configure the Related issues panel.

The Agent Extensions configuration page includes the 'Manage Tabs' section, which allows you to rearrange, edit, show/hide the default tabs.

You can also remove the tabs, but this doesn't work for default tabs (they can only be edited and hidden). If you edit a default tab, it will only be edited for the current project. All other projects with default tabs remain untouched.

It is also possible to use existing user-defined Jira filters to create a custom tab. To do this, you can fill in the data in the 'Add new Tab' form:

  • give your tab a name

  • give it a description (names don't have to be unique, so a description will help you differentiate tabs with the same name)

  • Select a filter, choose from Available Filter or JQL Filter. Available filters are the ones you have previously saved. Use the JQL Filter to enter a filter without previously having saved a filter in the Search section.

Click the 'Add new' button when you're ready. The Tab will immediately appear in the 'Manage Tabs' section so you can reorder it, edit it, hide/show it or remove it.

As you can see in the screenshot below, we have configured our 'Related Issues' panel to hide 'Similar Issues' and 'Account Issues' from the panel. We also added a new custom tab 'My Custom Tab' that uses a filter from the Available Filters.

If you wanted to edit a tab, you would only have to click on the 'Edit' icon next to the tab we want to edit. Please note that editing a default tab only changes the JQL filter (Figure 1), while editing a custom tab allows you to change everything (Figure 2).

Please also note that a user-defined tab page configured by a Jira filter also retains the rows configured for this Jira filter. If you want to change this, you need to edit the original Jira filter via the Jira user interface.

Comments

To configure how comments will work navigate to the tab 'Comments' inside the project settings under Agent Extensions.

You have two options to check.

  • Default - Comment internally will be the default comment. 
    If checked, this will make the button Comment internally the default button. 

  • Warning - For public comments a pop-up has to be accepted.