John Tolle

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).

Thanks, Daragh, for the suggestions.  I stopped using bookmarks years ago because it made my memory lazy and I bookmarked so many sites that the bookmarks because worthless (finding the right bookmark took more time than simply recalling the memory in my own head).

Right now, I simply type in our support URL which goes to our Zendesk site... and loads the infamous dashboard.

But my habits, as far as To Bookmark or Not To Bookmark, are a distraction from the issue at hand.

That's a good suggestion Daragh, but only works if you're logging in from your own computer.  I realize that seems like a copout, but I should be able to login and have the site recognize what I want to see as a first page no matter whether I'm using my own or a public browser.  Also, if you're someone who doesn't use bookmarks (I don't), this workaround won't do you any good.

Nicole, it's nice to see that someone at your level has gotten involved, but it's disappointing that it won't even be addressed this year, and who knows when/if it will get into a sprint next year.

Even if we can't customize the Dashboard (yet), it would be fantastic just to be able to direct users to a specific View upon login (a quick addition to organization-wide Settings along with the related redirect code).  Sure, the Dashboard remains useless but at least we can skip those first few clicks to get to a useful View.  Even better, allow users to chose their own "first page" upon login - either the Dashboard or a View.

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.

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?

@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!

@Yuri, why in the world not? 

We've all provided use cases that may well be applicable to the majority of your user base.

Anyone using both Zendesk and JIRA would benefit greatly as most companies have different users of Zendesk (support) than they do on JIRA (developers).  The latter cannot access files on Zendesk unless authentication is disabled for Zendesk attachments, over which any security person worth their salt would have a fit.  And yet, we all do it anyhow because we have no choice (other than to manually download the files from Zendesk and upload them to JIRA, which is a horrible time wasting side task for any workflow!)

Is there some limitation in the JIRA/Zendesk API that simply does not allow transferring files?

Keep in mind that, while the attachment link has to be "public" to allow your dev team to get to the attachments without a Zendesk login, and that's not particularly secure, the links are not easily guessed or even brute forced since the identifier portion of the URL is a 25-character random string.

Ultimately, though, as Christine originally requested, there should be a way to properly send the actual files to JIRA, and not links.

@Vanvliet, it may be technically off-topic, but it's still relevant and, unfortunately, the only possible suggestion since it's currently impossible to actually send files as attachments to the issue generated in JIRA.

I cannot agree enough.  In our case, it would be nice to share attachments from JIRA to Zendesk, but not a requirement.

What is a requirement, however, is to allow sending the actual file attachment rather than a link from Zendesk to JIRA.  Why?  Because our developers don't provide support and our support team does not develop.  We cannot afford to buy all of our developers Zendesk licenses just so that they can open up attachments in Zendesk.

I asked Zendesk for a workaround and they do not have one.  What does everyone else do to get around this issue?