Wanna See Some More? Now Your External Users Can Become Watchers on Jira Issues

A new feature has just launched in the cloud version of our External Share for Jira app. We call it ‘External Watch’.

External Watch lets your external users subscribe to the issues you’ve given them access to. That’s good for them because it saves them time. It’s good for you because it makes collaboration more immediate so that work can progress faster.

For the uninitiated, External Share for Jira gives external users secure, temporary access to a live Jira issue by generating unique links with optional passwords and time limits, and easy-to-specify permissions. External users are able to see, comment on, and add attachments to issues in real time. This enables you to collaborate without exporting the data someplace else or buying the user a Jira license.

Till now, external users had to open the External Share link from time to time to look for updates on the issue. Now they can watch for changes by subscribing for email notifications. It means they get emails if any field in the issue is changed, including Summary, Description, Environment, Status, Priority, Assignee, Due Date, and any custom field. They’ll also get an email if a comment or attachment is added or updated.

The External Watch feature is useful for contractors waiting for internal users to action something, and stakeholders who may be interested in progress on certain tasks. It also enables different companies to work together more efficiently; when company 1 has finished X, company 2 can go ahead and do Y. And if you’re sharing a public roadmap about a product, it means customers can subscribe for updates on features they’re interested in.

In broader terms, External Watch brings us closer to offering external users the same functionality that internal users enjoy.

The feature respects existing sharing configurations. So if comments viewing is disabled for a particular link, the external user won’t get notifications about any new or updated comments.

External Watch is available in both the Lite and Pro versions of External Share for Jira. It will also be added soon to External Share for Confluence.

Wanna give it a go?