Atlassian Access - verify domain but not manage all accounts

Question

We are required to set up SSO for a specific project with a third party. However our workplace is vast and as 50K+ accounts, many of which may have used Atlassian products elsewhere on different projects.

Is there a way to verify our top-level domain for our new project jira/confluence instance, but not "manage" the accounts of other users who have used their email address for other jira sites?

Would be we get charged $4 per user with Atlassian Access if we verify our domain then suddenly have 1000s of managed accounts, even if they are unrelated to the project we have just setup?

Dave Mathijs · Answer

Maybe this article can clear things up:

https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/understand-authentication-policies/

Andrew Wilson_dvdwll · Answer

Hi @Dave Mathijs  Thank you so much for answering!

The issue is we are a higher education establishment, meaning students, faculty staff etc all may use Atlassian products already elsewhere.  We've got 3k accounts already (only 2 of them are needed for the new jira site!) , and it looks like we cannot even progress setting up SAML or implementing security policies till we claim the existing accounts - the domain is verified, but all the SSO pages state it's not verified, assuming due to us not claiming accounts yet.  (at which point they will receive a message saying this) - plus we don't want to be responsible for managing the rest!

Think we might need to go back to the drawing board...

Dave Mathijs · Answer

Hi @Andrew Wilson A managed account does not mean a licensed account. Site and product access can be managed manually or via user provisioning (SCIM).

As a verified domain is a prerequisite for SSO, this also means that all email addresses of that domain will become managed accounts by default. You cannot split 1 domain into part managed, part non-managed accounts.

Please note that external users (i.e. external users having an email address NOT on your domain) wil not become managed as they will use their Atlassian account credentials to login and will NOT use SSO.