Managed Teams is now available to Premium and Enterprise customers!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Guard folks 👋

My name is April, I'm a product manager working on Atlassian Teams.

I'm excited to announce that we're publicly releasing our new Team configuration called Managed Teams today. 

Currently, there’s only one type of team, that can either be invite-only or open to all. From today onwards, you should be able to see Managed Teams.

As Atlassian Guard customers, you'll be able to leverage an externally managed team i.e. connect a Team to SCIM-synced group.

**All eligible customers will have access to Managed Teams by the end of March. 

For those in the EAP, you will not experience any changes. 

**This feature will be available for organizations with at least one Premium or Enterprise plan for Jira Cloud, Confluence Cloud, Loom, or Compass.

What are Managed Teams?

Managed Teams are teams that have been connected to a group, which becomes the source of truth for membership in that team

You can connect either an externally managed group or a local Atlassian group.

• Managed Teams can only be created and deleted by organization admins in Atlassian Administration

• The connected group acts as the source of truth membership, meaning:

  • Any membership changes to the group will be automatically reflected in the connected team

  • Team name will change to match the group

• Since Managed Teams can only be changed by organization admins, they are given a  verified indicator when shown across apps.

Why did we build this?

Your feedback was a big factor in this, as we heard from multiple organizations that were encountering these challenges:

1. Having to manually create large Teams despite team structure existing in an external source already.

2. Having to manually update Teams, which is unsustainable due to frequent reorganizations and employees joining or leaving.

3. The risk of end users inadvertently connecting an 'unofficial’ Team to work used in critical reporting workflows.

Managed Teams are kept up-to-date with the connected group and remove the friction in keeping teams accurate and updated.

🔨 How to create a Managed Team

** The following can only be done if you’re an organization admin.

To create a managed team, you can either connect a group to an existing team or create a new one to connect to. The group you connect a team to can either be a SCIM-synced group or a local group.

1. Find the group you want to connect in the Groups directory in Atlassian Admin.

2. On the group’s profile page, find the Create team or Connect team button near the members list.

   1. For teams connected to SCIM-synced groups, team membership will mirror the group’s membership that’s pulled from an external source.

   2. For teams connected to local groups, team membership mirrors the connected group’s.

🤝 Incorporate Managed Teams into your work

Associate your work with Managed Teams: Teams indicated by a  are Managed Teams that have been ‘verified’ by an admin.

View the Managed Team and their work: End users and org admins can view Managed Teams and their activity in their own page indicated by  .

👓 Oversee your Managed Teams

Keep your Managed Team secure: Managed Teams cannot be created, deleted, or managed by end users. It mirrors the metadata in the group - manage the membership in Atlassian Administration through the group.

📝 View all Team activity in the audit log: View when your Teams are created, deleted, or edited in the audit log. This can be viewed for user managed Teams too if you have access to Atlassian Guard.

Let me know if you have any feedback on the feature. 

Cheers,

April

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @April Chi I noticed a separate panel called Agents within a Team (under the Members panel)

We have a created a Team where some of the members have a JSM license and are part of the Service Desk Team role in a service project.

However, none of them are listed under 'Agents', all of them are listed under 'Members'.

What is the function of 'Agents' within a team? I'm unable to find any information in the documentation.

[YY Brother]

Awesome features in Teams! Thanks @April Chi 

I have two questions—could you take a look?

1. Customers on the Standard Plan with the Guard product currently don’t have access to this feature. Could you share the reasoning behind this limitation?

2. With Managed Teams now added, will there be any impact on Team-related or Group-related APIs? If the only difference is a classification between original teams and managed teams, then I assume there’s no impact. Could you confirm?

Thanks,
Yong

[Jimi Wikman]

For a while now we have synced AD groups into Atlassian groups, and now we can instead have it as Managed Teams. I love it!

You say this is only for SCIM though, so that means that if we have nested groups in our AD, we will not be able to use this?

Two thumbs up on this regardless, so great work on this!

[Jimi Wikman]

@YY BrotherThis should have no impact on the API's since you should not be able to interact with these groups unless you assign org admin rights to the API user (which is a big no-no). I assume since this is set in Guard for syncing groups, there should be no API for this activity for security reasons. This should only be for the sync of users as part of Guard.

This is a team object, so groups should also not be impacted.

Let's see if we can get this confirmed though as I am just speculating .)

[April Chi]

Hey @Dave Mathijs ,

Thanks for reaching out. At this point in time, the 'Agents' section is referring to AI agents and not JSM agents. They are AI team mates that are able to collaborate with team members on work. There's more on this here: 

https://support.atlassian.com/rovo/docs/agents/

Let me know if this helps and if you have any other questions! 

[April Chi]

Hey @YY Brother ,

Thanks for reaching out and appreciate the questions and interest in the feature. 

1. Customers on the Standard Plan with the Guard product currently don’t have access to this feature. Could you share the reasoning behind this limitation?

   • Unfortunately, this is a feature for customers with at least 1 Premium license of Jira, Confluence, Loom, or Compass only. This was decided as this is the first part of other features coming to Teams that will ensure enhanced compliance and flexibility of Teams. 

2. With Managed Teams now added, will there be any impact on Team-related or Group-related APIs? If the only difference is a classification between original teams and managed teams, then I assume there’s no impact. Could you confirm?

   • As Jimi has said, confirming there's no impact on the APIs. The new feature is that you can now connect your Teams to Groups via API here.

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any other questions.

[April Chi]

@__ Jimi Wikman :

re: 

For a while now we have synced AD groups into Atlassian groups, and now we can instead have it as Managed Teams. I love it!

You say this is only for SCIM though, so that means that if we have nested groups in our AD, we will not be able to use this?

Two thumbs up on this regardless, so great work on this!

Thanks Jimi! It would still work with nested groups in AD as AD automatically flattens the group structure beforehand - see more here.

Basically, this will work as long as you have a SCIM-synced Team.

Let me know if you have any other questions.