JIRA integration supports attachments

We are just implementing this add-on and this seems like a huge oversight. Our organization can't turn off the "require login to download" attachment feature. 

@Christopher, currently attachment sharing is done via hyperlinks to Zendesk and requires for anonymous access to attachments. I understand that in your situation that is not possible, but there is no other solution unfortunately. 

I'm planning to revisit this area of the integration later this year to see if we can provide a different solution.

@yuri - I am +1 this feature to have it transfer the file as others have said. There are many privacy concerns such as HIPAA that I am dealing with and currently can't allow people so use this feature if you can't actually send the send the attachment. 

Sure they could tell the developer to click in the zendesk tab to download the attachment but there could be 10 of those...and only 1 is relevant. 

I am actually shocked this has not been resolved yet and you have open sharing. I don't want to pay for each developer to have an account. Not that this solution would be ideal but in the short term could you make a new account type that just gives a user auth and download privileges of attachment links?  Those users could be free and all they can do is have a secure login and ability to download files. Not perfect but its something.

I just realized the zendesk tab also just contains the link.  I for sure have to turn on the extra security due to privacy concerns. I still think an easy solution would be to create a new user type to allow for this. 

Why dont you provide a upload file facility when we are adding comment from Zendesk to Jira and vice-versa, as our team require to share the files between them.

I find it hard to believe something this critical is still unsolved. Both my Zendesk account manager and the Jira Support forum state that we should be provided with a timeframe for this update.

When can we expect attachments from Zendesk to transfer over to Jira? The engineers in Jira have no way of seeing files uploaded by the support team in Zendesk. This is the case in 80+% of our incoming tickets!

If there is no answer, how can we escalate this flaw?

Agree with Jamie - the answer I got was that you have to buy a user for them. You can buy a special type but it is still $25/user per month with a minimum of $250/mo which is crazy for just viewing attachments. They could create a new free user that only has rights to view attachments. But it continues to go unsolved. 

Hi Everyone!

We definitely appreciate your feedback and our Product team actively watches these threads for the discussion. Per their feedback: 

Currently, attachments from Zendesk are shared as part of comments - not actual attachments, which meets the needs of many of our customers but unfortunately not everyone. While the product team is considering adding this feature at some point in the future, it's not on the roadmap currently. If you require this functionality you can consider one of the 3rd party commercial tools that are available on the market.

Hi Laura,

I don't believe your statement is accurate.  As long as someone has to authenticate with Zendesk to retrieve the attachments via the comments, it doesn't satisfy the need for the enhancement.  Perhaps that is what you were inferring, but wanted to make that clear.  Hope this gets prioritized soon.  Thanks.

Hi Laura -

What 3rd party commercial tools to handle this are you referring to? Is there an addon that makes zendesk attach tickets to a jira ticket so you do not have to have a zendesk login to view an attachment from a ticket created in zendesk? 

@Jake G, @Bill Cicchetti noted that he was trying out Azuqua.  Perhaps that is what Laura was referring to.  Unfortunately, unless you're a large organization, its pricing is prohibitive, and it's massive overkill for the task at hand.  Laura, we'd love to hear what some other options are for add-ons (especially those usable by Cloud instances) that will actually move the bits and bytes of our Zendesk attachments over to JIRA (instead of worthless links [Now in two places instead of one!])

Regardless of available add-ons, this should be a native thing.  Either tell us that it's not possible due to limitations in the JIRA API (it's not) or that 4 out of 5 Zendesk users think Atlassian is for the birds, so it's just not worth Zendesk's effort.  Because, seriously, it cannot be that hard to implement such an obviously useful and intuitive feature, and it would drastically improve the workflows of anyone who uses both Zendesk and JIRA.  People like me, who have access to both systems, suffer much wasted time from having to download the files to my desktop then upload them to JIRA so it's properly attached to ensure that non-Zendesk users can access the attachments they need to do their jobs!

Hey John - 

It just comes down to a prioritization issue. At the moment there are other more pressing things that effect more users and the team had to prioritize those things. Yuri has indicated that this is something he's interested in revisiting when they have some bandwidth, but the team's backlog is full up at the moment. 

Hi Nicole - I think most of understand this and respect it - but you have to agree something this major should be addressed. It kills my support team when trying to create tickets in Jira from Zendesk tickets and waste so much time.

It's such a fundamental feature I don't see how this has not been resolved yet

Yuri mentioned in July of 2017 he was going to revisit this at the end of 2017. Did that not happen? I take it Zendesk does not see this as a priority since it has been ongoing since 2015.

As @Jake G stated, we understand this and respect it, because I'm willing to bet that almost everyone in this thread and a decent percentage of your overall user base work at companies that commonly deal with development resource constraints and hefty backlogs.

This particular issue was raised June 20, 2014 by @Christine Magnusson, but it's likely been an issue since it was first introduced, whenever that was, because it was either not thoroughly considered when it was first designed or there really were limitations in one or the other API that could not be overcome at that time, so compromises were made with which we now struggle.

So is there anything we can do to convince the Backlog Lords to raise this up in priority so that it actually gets resolved in a reasonable timeframe?

Hey John - 

My best suggestion is for users to continue voting on the thread and sharing details like how frequently the problem comes up, how much time it takes out of their workload, and what the impact on their business is. 

Just chiming in to vote and give my +1.  It's a little disappointing to see that this conversation has been going on since 2015 and given that there was a recent update to the integration, that this attachment functionality was not included.  This is critical to our Support & Development processes and adds a ton of extra effort for our agents. Would really like to see this in the near future.

It is rather funny to read this thread. Discussing the issue of opening files from Zendesk since 2014? A question of priority? We've been considering moving to JIRA for better integration with Zendesk, but the lack of sharing files stops us from switching from a competitor. Spent several days testing JIRA + Zendesk integration. 

Our organization would also benefit from the ability to transfer attachments directly to JIRA.  In large part this is because our developers do not have time to search through the ticket chains for the appropriate attachment when they are investigating an issue.

The ideal implementation for us would be that the Zendesk agent gets to choose which attachments are transferred to JIRA.  A bulk transfer of all attachments would just lead to overwhelming clutter.

@all, my understanding was that the authentication to download option only requires that the person have a zendesk account.  It does not require that they have agent status.  While it's not ideal, couldn't your developers create end-user accounts in your support portal so that they can then download files using the secure links.

TL;DR:

End-users cannot have sufficient privileges to access attachments across all organizations.  Attachments should be properly imported as native Jira attachments when linking to Jira issues.

The longer version:

@katie, enabling security on attachments requires not only that you can login to Zendesk as an end-user but also that the end-user is also a member of the organization that submitted the attachment.  So, if you have end-users grouped into organizations, your developers (using their end-user accounts) wouldn't be able to access the attachments submitted by your customers (using end-user accounts with various organizations).

In fact, by default, end users can only access their own tickets (and therefore their own attachments).  You need to go into the user settings and change the user's Access setting...

From: "Can view and edit their own tickets only"

To: "Can view tickets from user's org."

In other words, only Agents and Administrators can access attachments from all tickets, regardless of organization, so end user accounts are not a good solution for developers that need to download attachments (unless you ensure that organizations are not used at all).

The Zendesk help articles on this subject were not as specific as they should be, and they might make you think that all you need to be is an end-user to access attachments.  I had to experiment and check out all the settings myself.

Please add me as an interested party to this request.  Our tickets get long and attachments may be scattered across comments that are far apart.  It is very time consuming to actually find the correct attachment.  It would also be beneficial to be able to rename attachments.  Some attachments have esoteric names that do not denote their content.  We have to open each attachment to know what it is.  

How's that backlog looking?  If this issue hasn't gotten a raised priority, we will soon be forced to consider different support systems (moving away from Zendesk).

Chiming in for the absolute need of this.

Reading this thread is a ridiculous experience... A feature that seems like it should be a no brainer to have in such an integration is being discussed as a matter of prioritization for 4 years, when in fact the whole integration is not fully functional without it.

This is a feature that I need badly as my company continues to grow.

Our engineering team decided to go with JIRA and after integrating it did I find the shortfalls that everyone else has mentioned. 

Reading this thread is a terrible experience trying to find out why my attachments aren't going through to my engineering teams tickets. This is a feature that seems like it should been thought of first during development and the fact that is still being discussed as a matter of prioritization for 4 years is crazy.

Not all support team members have access to JIRA and not all engineering teams have access to zendesk because of cost per seat.  

Should this not be addressed I will need to look at other support platforms that work better with JIRA.  

Also would love better attachment handling between the two. 

I can see that this feature is something many have been asking for, unfortunately development resources are limited and we've been prioritizing other integration work above this feature.

Please continue to vote as this give a clear indication of how common the need is. 

this "no brainer" functionality should have been included from day 1. defeating whole purpose of the integration 

I have to jump on board here. This is a necessary feature and I cannot believe it is not even out of the backlog after 4 years. My organization is just switching over to Zendesk and If I had known this feature was not available I would have pushed back strongly on the decision to go with Zendesk. Our current system allows this feature and it is painless and easy. Zendesk is easily going to be adding hours per day to my support staff. They will not be pleased. Please address this, this is a very basic and useful function that the majority of your competition supports. 

Please consider this. We are pending for it, its essential to support our daily operations.

This feature would be awesome; any updates to this feature?

Hi Isaac,

Thanks for your feedback, I've taken note and added to the candidate feature. 

Unfortunately this isn't on our current roadmap, I'll update you if we bring the feature in.

Thanks,

David