JSD and Atlassian access

Question

Just need some clarity, and sales told me to ask the question here (why CSR wyn doesnt know what his own products can do is pretty sad, but anyways)..

I am looking into getting jira service desk for this company. It would be the cloud version. We would be buying 10 agent licenses and then the customers as i understand it, are free. However, its a little less clear whether if we want single sign on, we need to pay for the customers in the form of an atlassian access account for each one. When i went through the setup and linking the domain, it wanted to use atlassian access. I dont care if i use that or not, i just need single sign on for my customers. In on prem jira, this was done by a plugin.

So the question is, do i need to license JSD customers if we use Atlassian access? This seems to be the only way to get single sign on which of course would be essential. Can someone clarify? thanks.

Dave Meyer · Answer

Hi @JiraYo ,

You can sync users from your identity provider as JSM customers without them being automatically billable in Atlassian Access.

There's more information on how to set this up in the discussion thread here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/How-to-manage-Customers-in-combination-Atlassian-Access/qaq-p/1928615

We acknowledge that it's a little convoluted – better support for this is on our roadmap.

JiraYo · Answer

So then we do need a license. Because who the hell is going to personally manage 800 accounts and their passwords when we have the damn directory.

I read all the faqs, i am saying its intentionally ambiguous. Because no one is going to run without SSO. Maybe someone who had a public help desk would, but all companies are going to have some kind of authentication mechanism already in place of course!!!

Since we seem to have no other option for SSO rather than atlassian access in the cloud version of JSD (correct me please if i am wrong...)  then by default, JSD admins who want to use SSO need to pay for those customer accounts.

Really crappy and will prevent my company from pursuing this. Guess i need to give up the dream of jira at this place... Really sucks if you have hundreds or thousands of customers in your organization. I think they wanted like 25k a month just for user accounts....

Dave Mathijs · Answer

Have a look at this FAQ: What's the difference between managed and billable users?

However, without SSO:

Jira Service Management customers that submit tickets are not counted toward the Atlassian Access bill. Only Jira Service Management Agents that log in using an Atlassian Access managed account are counted in Atlassian Access.