Assigning roles to multiple users

[Kyl]

We have a number of JIRA projects on the same JIRA instance. There's a large number of these projects (between 80 and 100) that each needsto provide the same access (generally read only) for dozens of users (production support, horizontal support, product leadership, etc.). 

I was thinking it would be great if we could enable our product owners, scrum masters, and Kanban leads to import the roles for the users - something similar to being able to import issues. Is that possible? If not, is there some alternative that could be used to support this need? 

[Radek Dostál]

If you are looking to allow users to create new Project Roles, I'd say don't - roles should be generic, and more than 3 is hardly arguably ever needed or good. You will end up having tons of seldom used roles, with missing entries in permission schemes to use them, and will lose track which ones are used and how, and will find it hard to remove deprecated roles eventually. Roles are not meant to be specific to actual positions, they are there simply for different permission levels.

In general for any broader access-permissions that's what user groups are for and can easily be added to existing roles.

Adding users to a group in bulk is as easy as pasting a comma delimited list of usernames, whereas adding multiple users to a role is less convenient and would require a bit of REST API to automate in a better way (otherwise you'll click yourself to the bottom of the bottle). Adding a group to roles however is pretty simple.

[Kyl]

Thank you for the helpful answer, @Radek Dostál The team that manages our shared JIRA instance has been somewhat resistant to implementing groups, so we were trying to see if there was another way to achieve our desired end state. 

[Daniel Ebers]

Yes, this is based on the fact they would have to maintain the group for you (in case the group is one that must be maintained in Jira directly).

That means: you must consult them for every onboarding/offboarding in the teams - this can get a cumbersome job for them so I see their point.

Exception is if you maintain the group via external tooling (LDAP/AD) that you have access to -or- (even better) it maintains itself via a (semi-)automatic logic which puts them to a (say) jira_read_only group which is filled with people from: HR, product management and product development (and so on).

[Geoff Mether _Togetha Group_]

Hi @Kyl 

Project Administration \ Project Roles \ Add a new Project Role, add a new project role for all the existing projects.

To view go to a project, Project Administration \ Roles.

[Kyl]

Maybe I'm not following here. When I go to the Users and Roles content, I see how to add individual users to a role, and this is a task I've done. I'm asking for the ability to assign hundreds of users to a role in my team's project - and enable administrators of other projects to use that same list so that they can assign those same users to the same role in their own JIRA project. 

[Geoff Mether _Togetha Group_]

Ahh, thanks @Kyl for context.

I'd agree with @Radek Dostál 

"In general for any broader access-permissions that's what user groups are for and can easily be added to existing roles."

"Adding users to a group in bulk is as easy as pasting a comma delimited list of usernames"

Create the groups and then assign groups to project roles.

Note: If this was an on-premise solution (not-cloud), you could modify or create the Permission Schemes to open up the projects to read only to everyone.  I don't really like this solution as generally there will be people on your network that shouldn't have access (contractors/etc).