Project Customer (Not Portal-Only Customer) can't change their names.

[Pipat Thongklip]

I have looked through everywhere in the community who might have a similar issue like mine but I can't find anything at all.

My customers have registered into my project with a method that my admin team add their Atlassian account into our domain as "Jira Service Management - Customer"

and not a portal-only customer like my second account which I was able to change my name on that account.

When my customer tries to go into account and change their names, they were unable to edit their name and there was a message saying "This field is managed by an administrator" instead.

I'm not sure how they will be able to change their names, is it because they lack sufficient permission? If so what app permission that they should have to be able to change their names?

[Andrea Robbins]

This is expected behavior. When your admin team adds customers by creating Atlassian accounts under your organization's verified/claimed domain (doesn't matter the role), those accounts become managed accounts. Managed accounts give your organization full administrative control over the user's profile, including their display name. That's why customers see the message "This field is managed by an administrator".

In contrast, portal-only accounts are not claimed/managed by the organization, so users retain the ability to edit their own profile details (like their name) - which is why your second account can change its name.

[Pipat Thongklip]

Understood.

Since those accounts become managed accounts, is it possible for admins to change their names? Because currently in my admin account, I can't find any button to change managed account names.

Thank You

[Andrea Robbins]

Great question! It depends if your managed accounts are synced from an IdP or not: If not, an org admin can, if so, you will have to change it in your IdP, then the change will sync to Atlassian:

1. Organization admins - have full control over managed accounts, including editing display names, via admin.atlassian.com → Directory → Managed accounts.

2. Identity provider (IdP) admins - If your organization uses SCIM user provisioning (e.g., through Okta, Azure AD, or Google Cloud), the IdP becomes the source of truth for user details like name and email. In that case, name changes would need to be made in the IdP, and they'll sync automatically to Atlassian. Neither org admins nor site admins would be able to override those fields directly in Atlassian — the change has to come from the IdP side.

[Pipat Thongklip]

Understood, I will check with my customers if they created their account by syncing with their IdP or not.

Thank you for your clarification.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

Hello and welcome to Atlassian Community @Pipat Thongklip 

Just adding to @Andrea Robbins  answer, Jira project or JSM customer permissions don't control this. For managed Atlassian accounts, name updates must happen either via an organization admin in Atlassian Administration or directly within your identity provider when synced

Checking if the account is organization-managed or IdP-synced will tell you exactly where you need to make the change.

PS: Here some official "Food for Thoughts" because nothing exchange good lecture 😉https://support.atlassian.com/user-management/docs/make-changes-to-a-managed-user-account/ 

Best,

Arkadiusz 🤠

[Pipat Thongklip]

I have checked on this section already, but it says "Details managed by the user"

So I can't edit anything at all.

At the same time, the on the user side also encountered "This field is managed by an administrator"

Is it possible that the user required more than just "Jira Service Management - Customer" app permission? Maybe need some more app permission like "Jira Standard - User" role for example.

Thank you for your warm welcome.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

@Pipat Thongklip 

Thats how it should look for Managed Accounts

For portal-only customers, Atlassian has a separate path where org/site admins can edit the full name under Products → Jira Service Management → Portal-only customers.

[Pipat Thongklip]

For my customers accounts, I already check in the User tab, it shows like this

 

but when I told my customer to change the name on their side, they got directed to this page and got the message that their name was set by the administrator.

 

As if this is a loophole that the admin can't change the customer's name and the customer can't change their name.

[Pipat Thongklip]

Update: I saw that one of my customer has already changed their Public Name. It also reflected on their portal side and in their account side, but as a service desk team who operates ticket in the JSM Space or the back end, they still saw my customer's name as the old one.

Example:

Originally my customer was using Japanese character name. We requested them to change to English character name so that our service desk team type their name in the comment or add them in the request participant section.

My customer has showed me the screen shot saying that they already changed it but they encountered the permission message, but even though they changed their public name, which it also displayed on their portal and their profile section but from service desk team side they can still see them as Japanese character name.