Aggregating BitBucket Accounts Into A Corporate Instance

Question

Summary

I am cleaning up accounts and user access to our BitBucket data. I have a need to pass control of an existing BitBucket account to the admins on the main company Atlassian instance.

The desired end result is that the BitBucket data and access is controlled by our Atlassian system admins, and it is managed in a single instance.

Current Setup:

BitBucket Account 1: An account that is still in use but managed outside of the organisations Atlassian instance. It's a free account containing 8 years of work (~615 repos).

BitBucket Account 2: Newly created with a company wide implementation of Confluence and Jira. Contains no work or workspaces at the moment.

If I (as an admin) select the BitBucket app in the launcher while logged in, I am immediately directed into Account 2.

Suggested Approach

It doesn't seem like data migration is possible or the best way to achieve what I want. However maybe by changing the email and control of Account 1 to an admins email address, upgrading the account to a Standard plan, and then adding licensed users against it, I can achieve the end result I need.

Questions

* The accounts are connected in some way - I can see that there's app links with our corporate Confluence and Jira setups. This may be because the email address associated with the free account has been added as a user within that instance. But I'm not sure I understand exactly how this works?
* Will the suggested approach above create the desired end state?
* Is there a better way to approach this?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Theodora Boudale · Answer

Hi @Dave Keating ,

Please allow me to give some context first:

Since last year when we introduced workspaces, repositories in Bitbucket Cloud are owned by a workspace.
A billing plan is also associated with a workspace.
The Bitbucket Cloud account is what you use to log in to Bitbucket, but a single account can own or be part of multiple workspaces.

When we implemented this change, a workspace was created automatically for
- each Bitbucket individual account
- each Bitbucket team account

You mention that BitBucket Account 1 contains all your repos. I am not sure if the repos are owned by the personal workspace of this account, or if there used to be a team account administered by Bitbucket Account 1, containing all repos.

My suggestion would be to use a workspace that is not the personal workspace of a specific Bitbucket account, because if this person leaves the company, then it won't be possible to remove their user from the workspace (since it's a personal workspace associated with their account). This might already be the case, but I can't say without knowing the workspace id that owns your repos now.

Regarding your suggested approach:

This would work in order to transfer ownership of the account and the workspaces it owns to a different user.
Please note though that in order for you to be able to make this email change, an Atlassian account (https://id.atlassian.com/) with the email you want to change to should not exist already.
If it exists, you won't be able to make the email change, but you can reach out to Bitbucket Cloud support team to assist with this.

If the workspace that owns your repos is not the personal workspace of BitBucket Account 1, the email change may not be necessary, and you can simply add a new administrator to the workspace, via the workspace's Settings > User groups.

You mentioned

The desired end result is that the BitBucket data and access is controlled by our Atlassian system admins, and it is managed in a single instance.

Please note that at the moment, access to Bitbucket Cloud is managed via the workspace's Settings, and not on the organization level via https://admin.atlassian.com/, like for Jira and Confluence Cloud.

Any user that has admin access to a workspace, can manage user access to this workspace.

Regarding your question:

The accounts are connected in some way - I can see that there's app links with our corporate Confluence and Jira setups. This may be because the email address associated with the free account has been added as a user within that instance. But I'm not sure I understand exactly how this works?

I am not sure what app links you are referring to. It would be helpful to have a screenshot, to understand what you are referring to.

I believe we can give you better advice if we know
- the usernames of both accounts 
- the workspace id of the workspace that owns your repos
- the email of the admin you are considering transferring ownership to
so we can see in our system what is the current state.

If you don't want to share this info here publicly for privacy reasons, you can open a ticket with the support team providing this info, and request for suggestions and assistance with the email change (if assistance is required from our side for the email change to happen). The support ticket will be visible only to you and Atlassian staff.

You can open a ticket via https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/, in "What can we help you with" select "Technical issues and bugs" and then Bitbucket Cloud as product.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

Kind regards,
Theodora