Video - External Participants in GitLab Service Desk
Goal of the video.
The goal of this video is to showcase the new functionality of the external participants feature. This video will be featured in the release post item for 17.0 , a potential blog post and used as general learning material for the feature and Service Desk in general.
Video-Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKNe7fYQCLc
Short description
Description used for YouTube, LinkedIn etc.
TBD
Content
Material collection for the video.
Script
Today I'd like to show you the new multiple external participants feature for GitLab Service Desk, which is available in GitLab 17.0.
Now you can add up to 10 external participants without a GitLab account to your service desk tickets and issues so they can also be part of the conversation. Let's take a deeper look.
Add participants
In service desk, the external requester is the person who created the service desk ticket and the first external participant of your ticket.
Now there are two ways to add more external participants to your ticket.
The first is to use the quick action /add_email, which allows you to add up to six email addresses in one go as external participants. You'll see a success message and a system note entry so you know when someone joined the discussion.
The second option is to configure GitLab to add all email addresses from the Cc header of the initial email to the Service Desk ticket.
Go to your project settings and expand the service desk section and select the checkbox Add external participants from the Cc header and save the changes.
The external author receives the thank_you notification email and all other external participants receive the new_participant email. More on that later.
So from now on all external participants on the ticket receive Service Desk email notifications for all new public comments and their replies will appear as comments in the GitLab UI.
Remove participants
If you want to remove someone from the list of external participants, you can use the /remove_email quick action and use the email address as the parameter.
This will remove them from the list of external participants so they don't receive notifications anymore. But they are still able to reply to notification emails they already received.
New participant email
When you add an external participant to your ticket or issue, the new_participant email will be sent to notify them that they are now part of the conversation and can participate in the discussion.
If you want to customize the email, you can do so because it supports the same templating functionalities that are available for the thank_you and new_note emails.
Head over to your project that holds the service desk tickets and press the . key on your keyboard to open the GitLab web IDE in a new browser tab.
Alternatively, you can clone the repository locally and use your preferred IDE.
If you already customized Service Desk email templates, open that folder.
If not, create a .gitlab folder and inside that, the service_desk_templates folder and create a new file called new_participant.md.
This is a markdown file that will render HTML in the end. You can use most of the markdown features and also a few HTML tags. Additionally, you can use the same service desk placeholders that are available for the thank_you template.
This is a sample template that contains all available placeholders. Adjust this to your needs.
If you use the issue description placeholder, please make sure you don't edit the description or you don't add confidential or internal information to the description node.
If you have a publicly available GitLab instance and want to allow your customers of your service desk to unsubscribe, make sure to include the unsubscribe link.
Unsubscribe
By default each service desk email contains an unsubscribe link that is unique for the email and the external participant so they can self-opt out from receiving any updates for the issue.
Outro
So in the nutshell Service Desk now allows you to have a conversation with up to 10 external participants that don't have a GitLab account.
Please try it out, check out the documentation, leave feedback on the epic or the feature issues or create a new issue in our issue tracker.
We really love to hear your feedback and are looking forward to improving the experience for you.
So that's it for today. Take care and see you soon.