user setup across Confluence and Jira Service Management

[Natascha Dabrowski]

Hi Atlassian Community,

I’m struggling with a user setup across Confluence and Jira Service Management (JSM) and hope someone has solved this before.

We already had a colleague working with Jira Service Management, where he:

• creates tickets
• views and processes his existing tickets

All his tickets are linked to this original Jira user.

Now we added the same colleague to Confluence, but did this via Global User Management.
Since then, Jira Service Management shows two separate users:

• the original Jira user (with all existing tickets)
• a second user coming from Confluence, which appears as an external user

This causes multiple problems:

• The Confluence user is treated as an external customer in JSM, which is not correct
• The colleague now technically has two accounts
• Existing tickets are still linked to the old user
• It’s completely unreasonable for the user to remember which account to log in with where

What I want to achieve:

• One single user account
• Access to Confluence
• Ability to create, view, and work on Jira Service Management tickets
• All existing tickets should remain correctly assigned and visible

My questions:

• What is the correct way to set this up?
• Is it possible to merge these users or convert the external user into an internal one?
• Do Jira Service Management and Confluence need to share the same Atlassian account/license setup for this to work properly?

Any best practices or hints are highly appreciated.
Thanks a lot!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hi @Natascha Dabrowski ,

Are you saying this user was initially portal-only customer and now they have Atlassian account for accessing Confluence?

I mean, there cannot be two separate Atlassian accounts associated with the same email address.

If we're talking about portal-only customers, you can navigate to admin.atlassian.com > Apps > Sites > *select site > Jira Service Management > Portal-only customers. Then:

1. Search for the duplicated user (the external/portal-only account).

2. Click the three dots next to their name and select "Migrate to Atlassian account".

3. This will deactivate the portal-only profile and migrate requests/tickets to the Atlassian account, consolidating everything under one user.

Some of the best practices would include always adding internal users (employees) via Atlassian account provisioning, and not as portal-only customers. We even tend to do that for external customers (but we don't have a very large pool of those)

There's also this article that might be helpful: Duplicate Account Issues in Jira Service Management Cloud 

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Tobi