Overview of the customer portal - Jira Tutorial

- [Instructor] Now that you have an understanding of how JIRA Service Desk is put together, let's go over in detail, each of these elements, as I show you how to configure them, and utilize them in the best way possible. Arguably, the most important piece of JIRA Service Desk is the Customer Portal. The Customer Portal is your client's view into the company's world, and serves as the access point to communicate with your customers. Once you have a new JIRA Service Desk project created, your portal is created automatically. We're going to start off by hitting the Administration COG, selecting Projects, and then selecting My JIRA Service Desk Project. On the left-hand side, I'm going to select Portal Settings. On the top of this page, I'm going to Right-click the View and Customize link, and select to Open It In A New Tab. This brings us to what is known as the Help Center. Now this can get a little confusing, so make sure your paying attention. The Help Center exists as the parent directory for all of your JIRA Service Desk Customer Portals within your JIRA Service Desk instance. If you have multiple service desk projects, you'll see links to each of these project's portals as links underneath the Text Entry Box. Now, as a user you can type in the text entry box, and it will attempt to search the knowledge base articles. To the right, you'll see some different options to customize your help desk center. At the top, you can rename the help center. You can also rename the front page title, by simply adding more text in this box. You can also add a new announcement, subject and message to serve as a temporary message to your visitors. You can add a new color scheme to your help center here, and also add a logo here. After making any changes to your help center, be sure to save them, by clicking the Save Changes button. Alright, let's go ahead and Close this tab. Now, back in our Project Settings page, we're going to click the Customer Channels button on the far left. By default, our customer portal URL is highlighted, so we're going to Copy it. We're going to go ahead and Open up a New Tab, and then we're going to Paste that information in there. Now, as you can see there's a text entry box for your knowledge base articles once again, if applicable. Underneath, on the left-hand side are what are called Groups. Now these groups are meant to act as categories for your different requests. If you have an IT project for example, you probably want to have an equipment request group, a tech support request group, maybe even another group, et cetera. You don't want to have a huge list of different requests for the user to have to search through. So by grouping them, this portal becomes a little easier to navigate. As you can see, I can click into the different groups, and the different requests will load. I also have a link up here, that'll take me back to the main help center if I need it. As the administrator, I can directly add into the announcement within this portal, by clicking this button. Standard customers who visit this portal will not have this option. I can add a subject for my announcement, a message, and an option to add links if I wanted to. (typing) Afterwards, I can click the Edit Announcement button to remove the announcement entirely, or Edit it if I need to. Let's go ahead and Close out of this Tab. Now we've returned to the Portal Settings page. Now, underneath that link that we used earlier to go to the help center, we'll see some portal-specific settings. I can Change the Name of the Portal here, which I will do now. I can Add, Alter, or Remove the Introduction Text here, which I can also do now. After making my changes, I Select the Check mark, and they are confirmed. I can also add a custom logo for the portal itself. The logo that I added previously, was for the help center. Remember, the help center lives on top of the individual portals. So if you want different logos for the different portals, you actually add them in the Portal Administration Settings, as opposed to the Help Center Administration Settings. The last section is the Announcement Settings. I can click this option to Add an Announcement. This opens a page just like what we were looking at earlier, to Add or Edit the Announcement Message. We also have a setting that allows the admin to choose whether or not agents of this project can alter the announcements. As you can see, by default only JIRA Administrators are allowed to edit the announcement on this portal. The great thing about the portal is its simplicity. A major problem in the past was getting users that didn't necessarily need to use JIRA that much, acquainted with what could sometimes be complicated software. As you can see, the portal is streamlined and simple-looking. And also as such, the configuration options contained within, are seriously limited compared to the customization options available in some other areas of JIRA.