User nicknames

Question

Hello there!

In the last years, one specific issue has been brought up quite a few times, but Atlassian has failed to recognize a certain use case.

We are a mid size software development agency, and we give our customers access to our Jira and Confluence instances. To prevent colleagues to communicate with a customer in an inappropriate way, we added "(COMPANY)" to the full name, when we were still using Jira Server, so e. g. "Gabe Newell (STEAM)". This was a convenient way to make it very apparent that this particular user is in fact a customer.

Now in the Cloud environment, the Atlassian accounts belong to the users themselves, which is fair. But we need a way to accomplish this.

There is ID-6415, which has a lengthy explanation of what can be done, but it misses one of the main use cases: What if the customer has their own Atlassian Cloud organisation, because they are running their own Jira, or they are already participating in different Cloud Jiras? In this case it's not possible to ask them to add (COMPANY) to their name, nor is it possible to ask them to let us manage their email domain within the Atlassian Cloud system.

It has to be acknowledged that the world needs something like "Local Nicknames", which would enable Site or Organisation admins to (locally) rename users that participate in the collaboration, but are not managed by the Organisation.

Many other services have this feature, for example Discord, which has "Server Nicknames". It shouldn't be rocket science to implement.

Thanks,
Ingmar

Ste Wright · Answer

Hi @Ingmar Heinrich

I can see where you're coming from, and see the value of this suggestion.

JAC is where Atlassian look at user requests though - if the idea isn't raised there, Atlassian might not know it has been (recently) requested.

I'd still encourage you to do it, regardless of what the outcome might be :)

Ste

Ingmar Heinrich_t6cdfy · Answer

@Ste Wright A "Public Name" that an account owner can set is not at all suitable, because it's global as well. What's needed is a way to have "Nicknames" that are local to Organisations or Sites.

I am reluctant to raise this as a JAC, because it will most likely be disappointing, but maybe I will do it.

It's disappointing altogether that Atlassian with all of its money and resources doesn't implement such a basic feature. Even services like Discord has it, because they understood how important it is to be able to have different names in different environments.

Ste Wright · Answer

Hi @Ingmar Heinrich

It's a good question!

There are other suggestions for this you can review - for example ID-6457 (which you've already commented on!)

There used to be "nickname" field on your Atlassian Account profile also at a point, I think it's now called "Public Name" (i.e the name used on the Community forums).

The best way to raise this request to Atlassian is still via JAC - if there's no open or specific request for what you need, I'd raise it via: https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa

Ste