Improvements and the next chapter of user management

[Daphne Zhang]

Hey admins! We’ve been looking forward to giving you an update on user management in the cloud. This update is most relevant for customers on the original user management experience, but everyone will benefit from improvements we’ve been making behind the scenes. 🎉

We’re bringing the benefits of centralized user management to all customers, without the need to consolidate multiple directories into one. Read on for more details.

Recap

In 2021, we announced a new, centralized user management model for customers in Atlassian cloud. This gives new customers one directory for their entire organization, no matter how many sites they create. Last year, we moved existing customers with only one site to this model.

While the centralized model is appropriate for many customers, it’s not suitable for others. In November, we decided not to migrate our remaining customers. We know for these customers, a multiple-directory setup is necessary and intentional.

What's next?

In Q4 this year, customers on the original user management model will see users across all their directories (sites) in one place. These users still exist in separate directories, but admins will save time otherwise spent switching between sites to manage their respective users and groups.

Admins will also manage any user who is in more than one directory in one profile. Instead of updating profiles for the same user in multiple sites, you’ll be able to manage a user’s details and app access in different sites from a single profile.

Before we can make these changes, we’re improving the centralized experience. We’re making it easier to find users and manage their access, especially in organizations with thousands of users. In fact, we’ve already released some of these changes! Check them out below.

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New APIs

In March, we released new APIs for user management. These APIs support user management operations at scale and can be used by all customers. Try them out! See API documentation

In the coming months, we’ll release more APIs for write operations.

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Updated user list

Currently available to the centralized experience only

In April, we started rolling out an update to the user list. This update separates Role, App access, and Status into separate filters, each with a search field to help you quickly find your criteria. You can also choose to show up to 100 results on a page, reducing the number of pages you need to navigate. With this update, you can also sort users by their public names.

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Coming soon

• Updated user profile (early access available)

• Updated group list

• Updated group profile

• More APIs

We’ll update this post as these are released.

As always, we’re interested in your feedback! If you have questions, leave a comment below.

Thank you,

Daphne

[Yatish Madhav]

Great stuff - thanks for this post @Daphne Zhang 

[Alin Faur]

This is definitely great news, thanks for sharing!

Our org has several sites and about 3,000 users, and we were looking forward for the centralized user management interface, as we don't need too much separation. Our main reason for that was to be able to properly manage user access to Atlassian Compass, which is not possible through the classic interface.

Is this something that the new updates are considering?

[Daphne Zhang]

Hey @Alin Faur, I can find out for you. Can you tell me a bit more about what you're unable to do in the classic interface (original user management) to manage access to Compass?

[Alin Faur]

Hi @Daphne Zhang , thanks for circling back!

In the classic interface, there's no possibility to control user role assignment (full user vs basic user) for Compass. The app description says that all users in the org can have basic access by default, we needed to restrict that to only a handful of users. However, when we create dedicated groups to access Compass, we can either grant those groups full user access or none.

We had a support ticket opened with Atlassian and an engineer applied a patch which made it so that the current list of full users remains as it is, but adding any new users to a group would grant them basic access only. It's a temporary workaround that satisfies our current need, but that can be insufficient in the near future.

We can get in touch and I could provide you with additional details (including the support ticket number and the details that were discussed). 

[Aneita]

Hey @Alin Faur

Thanks for the extra context! With the upcoming improvements, we will be updating this so that admins can manage users and the roles that they hold more easily. 

This applies to roles like Compass basic, Jira Product Discovery contributor, Jira Service Management stakeholder which today, in the original user management experience, isn't as intuitive. 

[Alin Faur]

That's great news, thanks for sharing!

Looking forward for updates! :-)