Data Center to Cloud: adding a group as request participants in JSM
By Kayabyte · Updated 2 November 2026
Short answer: Request participants in Jira Service Management are people, not groups, on Data Center and on Cloud. On Data Center, teams that wanted a whole team on every request usually used an automation or a script that adds the people of a group on request creation. Cloud’s native options are organizations, Automation rules that add named people, and manual adding. For groups that stay in sync, there is Group Participants, our app for this.
How it was done on Data Center
Service desk agents and customers could add participants to a request one person at a time. To get a whole team on requests, admins commonly used:
- Organizations or customer permissions to share requests with every customer of an organization. This shares visibility, but the people are not request participants and do not get request emails in the same way.
- A script or listener (for example with a scripting plugin) that reads the members of a Jira group and adds them as participants when a request is created. It works until the group changes, and it is code you have to maintain.
- A Marketplace plugin for default participants, where one exists for your version.
What Cloud offers natively
- Organizations, and the “Share with organization” sharing setting.
- Automation rules in Jira Service Management, which can add participants chosen by rule, for example a named person or a field value. They don’t take a group as an input.
- Adding participants by hand on each request.
The gap Atlassian tracks publicly is JSDCLOUD-1268, which asks for groups as request participants.
Details: Add a group as request participants in Jira Service Management, JSM organizations vs request participants and CC a whole team on every JSM request.
Your options in Cloud
- Organizations when the people are customers and you only need to share visibility.
- Automation for a short, fixed list of people.
- An app that works with groups. Group Participants (our app, built on Forge) adds the members of chosen Jira groups to requests by rule per request type, and an hourly sync adds new group members. It is free for up to 10 users, with pricing on the Marketplace listing for larger sites.
- Compare other Marketplace apps: Group request participants apps for Jira Service Management compared lists several, including their prices.
If you have this problem with 11 or more users and want to try it with us, see design partners.
FAQ
Can I add a Jira group as request participants on Cloud? Not with Jira’s own features. Participants are people, so a group has to be turned into a list of people by a rule, a script or an app.
Will my Data Center participant script work on Cloud? Not as it is. Cloud has no direct way to run the same script, so the logic has to be rebuilt with Automation or an app.
Does an organization replace request participants? Only partly. An organization shares requests with its customers. It does not make a group of agents or internal staff participants.
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