Dear Atlassian, can you please stop asking my users to violate corporate policy?

[#1]

Someone on our Identity team asked me yesterday:

Why is google drive an option to connect?  This is not a [company] standard which is onedrive.

Which is a fine question indeed.

And I'm not alone. My fellow champions mentioned that they don't use Slack, but their users continue to get prompted to connect Rovo to Slack.

Conversely, another says they're getting prompted [in Confluence - sorry, I'll add a keyword to this question] to connect to Microsoft Teams, when they already have connected Slack.

So, two things:

1. You're confusing our users. I can easily imagine somebody saying "Oh man, we have Slack now? Sweet! I hate Teams!" (I have a hard time imagining the converse, but sure, ok, maybe.)
2. You're compromising our security by encouraging users to connect to services that are outside of our approved corporate policy. As the same person from the Identity team wrote: "just dont want users encouraged to connect their personal non [company] google drive"

Yes yes. We all know the origin story of Atlassian. Part of your explosive growth was that anyone could download your cool little bug tracking software Jira and install it on a spare machine and they didn't HAVE to ask permission or get approval from corporate IT, procurement, legal, or trust teams.

Nope, just download and go! Shadow IT be damned!

Welp. You're a real company now, selling to other real companies. Please act like it.

[Darryl Lee]

Hum.

So assuming best intentions, MAYBE Rovo is only supposed to present that choice if they notice you have existing Google, Slack, or Microsoft session cookies, although... I'm pretty sure that's not how session cookies are supposed to work.

Has anybody gotten prompted to add Rovo connectors for products that they NEVER use and so therefore should not give off any signals that it's OK to ask the user to connect?

BUT ALSO, Connections to other sources should be at the Admin level, not the User level. Argh.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Darryl Lee 

As you are aware from other community threads and open JAC suggestions to prevent "marketing" prompts, this is definitely an ongoing problem.  A related problem is the confusion and extra work created by pushing UX experiments as the previous opt-out of "lab features" toggle no longer works predictably.  These things create non-value adding work (i.e., waste in lean terms) for customer admins tracking down if something is broken and / or undoing mistakenly used features, and for Atlassian Support when those same customer admins submit tickets to track down root causes.  As we have seen from the scale of some recent changes, it also reduces the trust of customers in Atlassian...and leads us to wonder: how aligned are the marketing, product, operations, and support teams within Atlassian?

I wonder about a re-thinking of the apparent approach: rather than too much "bias toward action" and "maybe apologize later if we were wrong", consider instead using positive control for enterprise tools.  Specifically...

• add the ability for customer admins to enable / disable such features / prompts,
• by default disable them all,
• directly notify customer admins (i.e., email, text, change control feed, etc.) of what is potentially happening (including a change management and risk plan), and
• for customers and admins who want it, allow a single toggle option to "give me everything you are trying / releasing immediately, regardless of any potential risks".

Free-license level customers will likely still be "stuck" as they have limited admin features.  And, allowing paid-license teams to positively control the features / push notifications on their timeframe will provide tools to make better choices aligned with their own enterprises.  Atlassian product leaders stated they will share more about their release planning in December 2025, so let's see what that includes.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)]

@Darryl Lee I feel like this is a discussion rather than a question?

I've found these adverts less invasive than others so far but agree with you and @Bill Sheboy 

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

lol every community needs a @Darryl Lee 

[Darryl Lee]

Thanks to @M Amine for liking this post, because I now realize I forgot to follow-up on this, bad me!

Way back in October I ALSO filed a ticket complaining about this, and the Support AI bot suggested I vote and follow these tickets:

• AI-1153 - Hide specific connectors from Atlassian Cloud
• ROVO-183 - Ability for org admin to enable/disable smart link connectors for Rovo

Because I did vote and follow, I saw this recent comment from John Zimmerman on AI-1153 which is spot-on:

Most of us are really tired of things like this being overlooked.  We don't even have Rovo/AI enabled and users are being prompted to connect their Google Drives.  We do not use Google Drive and we don't want users connecting theirs.  All this is doing for us is leading users to believe that it's ok to put org data in Google Drive and ask us for access to something we don't have to give them.  Really poor form.

And over in ROVO-183, back in July 2025, nexum Support left an excellent comment about the legal issues this opens up:

Without this control feature, we will not be able to use Rovo because of potential compliance and other legal violations, i.e. users connecting sources and therefore content to Rovo that are not approved by the corporation.

It was somewhat encouraging to see that in the next comment, in Aug 2025, @Alok Jain wrote:

We are working on this! Stay tuned

I sure hope so, because as Glo Boss-D'Itri wrote in Sep 2025:

Without the ability to have this our users can connect to tools that we would not like them too. Since we have already rolled out Rovo, there are no mitigating controls in place for us to block users from connecting to sources that we do not want to have in Rovo.

But yeah, it's now December. Sure, that's only 2 months, but there's been plenty of time for our users to connect to services that our companies don't use/support, or worse, connect to their personal versions of those services and start storing COMPANY data there.

[Darryl Lee]

OH, apologies for the late responses:

• YES, @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_  this should've been an article - thanks for moving it.
• YES, @Bill Sheboy , Atlassian needs to do better. Let's see, hm?
• And sigh, YES @Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_  I guess I'm that guy. There's a reason this is my avatar in Slack:
  

P.S. BTW, filing a support ticket didn't do much. I wrote:

Rovo is prompting my users to connect to Google Drive. We do use Microsoft's OneDrive, not Google. Please stop advertising Rovo connectors to my users.

Yes, AI already suggested:
AI-1153 - Hide specific connectors from Atlassian Cloud
ROVO-183 - Ability for org admin to enable/disable smart link connectors for Rovo

So I've voted for those. But this is a support issue as it is impacting production users and those of us who support them. Please prioritize fixing this instead of growing your Rovo usage.

Support responded:

I hope you are doing well, and thank you for contacting Atlassian today. My name is XXXX and I'll be assisting you with this case.

I understand you are looking to get some more visibility on the two open enhancement tickets.

AI-1153 - Hide specific connectors from Atlassian Cloud
ROVO-183 - Ability for org admin to enable/disable smart link connectors for Rovo

I can confirm that by voting and watching these issues; you have already notified our engineering team of the pressing requirement. They will review this and be able to update on the ticket once the features are in place.

I will note that both tickets are still in the "Gathering Interest" step.

[Dr Valeri Colon _Connect Centric_]

@Darryl Lee I smile every time I see your avatar — you’re an unsung hero in this space. Product communities can sometimes get so caught up in positivity that they lose a bit of authenticity. When we ignore the problems, we stop solving them.

Your “protagonist energy” is constructive and rooted in care — it’s clear you’re here to help others. And in a space where product partners may not feel free to speak candidly, you often say what others can’t. That matters.

[Owen Wallis]

Hi @Darryl Lee 

Thank you for raising this, and for explaining the context from your side so clearly.

You’re absolutely right that many of our customers operate in tightly governed environments where prompts to connect non‑standard tools can create real friction with internal policies.

Based on feedback like yours, we’ve introduced an opt‑out path for these Rovo third‑party connection banners at the site level. If your organisation needs to disable these prompts, your Atlassian admin can:

1. Raise a ticket with Atlassian Support via https://support.atlassian.com

2. Specify the affected cloud site(s) (e.g. your-site.atlassian.net) and request that the Rovo third‑party OAuth / connector banner be disabled for those sites.

Our Support team will work with you to turn off those prompts for the specified site(s).

Longer term, we’re also working on giving org admins more granular control over which third‑party applications can be surfaced and connected, which is being tracked in this request: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AI-1153

Thanks again for holding us to a higher bar here and for taking the time to share such concrete feedback, it’s directly influencing how we improve this experience.

[Darryl Lee]

This is great news Owen. I see you've added a comment to AI-1153 - Hide specific connectors from Atlassian Cloud

Will you also be updating ROVO-183 - Ability for org admin to enable/disable smart link connectors for Rovo?

Thanks!