Can we change email address on Jira Server Edition without issue?

Jonathan Rapoport_l0bqs0

If I change the email addresses of the users via ldap import will everything attached to the user name still be associated with them?

From what I can see now with server editions of JIRA and Confluence it appears that things are tied to the logon name of a user and not their email address. 

Can someone confirm if this is correct?

I want to change the email addresses prior to cloud migration as on cloud everything gets tied not to a user name but to the email address.

Andy Heinzer

Hi Jonathan,

In Jira Server and Data Center, every user account permits the user to login using their username.  But yes, in Jira Cloud, newly created accounts are using the user's email address to login.

That said, when you migrate from Server to Cloud using either the Migration Assistant or the XML import method, you can also import user accounts.  When using either of these migration methods, any existing user accounts in Jira Server will still reference the user_key field for making sure that the user data matches up to imported issue data.  So yes you could change the email address of a user account in server before you perform this migration.  I could see a scenario where you might want to do this so that when your users login to Jira Cloud that issues would be associated with their account such as what issues they are the reporter of, or assigned to, etc.

There are a few User Schema Settings you have in Jira Server, as explained in Connecting to an LDAP directory, that you need to make sure are setup correctly though for this to work as you expect:

1. User Unique ID Attribute: This is a unique identify for user objects from an LDAP service.  This value is not expected to change even if the username/email/etc change for the account. If this is set correctly for your type of LDAP this will help to ensure that Jira server updates that email value instead of creating a new user account.
2. User Email Attribute: this is the field Jira will look at to understand if the email address is when Jira does a sync

After you make this change in LDAP, you will need to make sure that Jira syncs with that user directory once more to make sure that it gets the expected change for that account.  Once that is complete, you can then begin the process of migrating that data.

Let me know if you run into any problems with this.

Andy