Policy for archiving projects - Help

Question

In the year 2025 we will have Jira Premium. We are unsure how to use the project archiving feature. In my instance we have 1300 projects created, only 30% of which I think are still active. However, archiving a project has its tradeoffs, as we cannot consume its data in a simple way.

We also use a plug-in to take data from Jira to PowerBI. When archiving the project we were also unable to take the data through this plugin's connector. I would like to know if anyone has already defined some internal policies with clear rules for archiving a project.

Here at the company we have a forum with Jira Admins where we create some policies for everyone to follow, but we still have doubts about the impacts of these filings on internal processes. It seems strange for me to ask this, considering that you don't have the context of my company, but if you could give me an overview of the challenges you face after archiving projects, I would be grateful.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

With native Jira functionality "searchable" and "visible" are based on the same set of permissions. If the project can be seen it can be searched. Editable is based on separate permissions.

The short answer is projects can be made visible/searchable while being read-only (not editable).

For Company Managed projects you would have to change the Permission Scheme assigned to the project.

For a Team Managed project you would have to change the Access settings for the project and users are assigned to the roles that have edit permissions. define custom roles in each project, giving the role only enough permissions to see project data, and the ensure that role.

Pedro Webster · Answer

We would like to archive projects, as we have around 1000 unused projects out of a total of 1,300.

The challenge is that many dashboards (portfolio and metrics) rely on Jira data. If I archive these projects, I won’t be able to extract data using the Power BI Jira Connector plugin, for example.

Is there a way to make projects invisible (and not editable) but still searchable, allowing us to extract data from Jira?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Pedro Webster

What is your goal in archiving the projects? What problems are you trying to solve with that?

Based on what you said, it sounds like the data content needs to remain visible/searchable. Is that required for all users who previously had access to the project while it was "active"?

Are you trying to prevent none/some/all data changes being made related to issues in those projects?

If you want to prevent all data changes but keep the content visible/searchable, then you need to update the permissions and user assignments to project roles in each project so that all the permissions that allow data changes are deallocated from all users, while the permissions that allow viewing the data (i.e. Browse projects, View Voters and Watchers, etc.) remain allocated appropriately.

How you allocate those "view" permissions depends on who/what needs to maintain the view capability. If your general policy is that all issues in all projects should be viewable by all users, you can make a simple Permission Scheme for that which could be applied to all Company Managed projects. If you have Service Management projects, the permission scheme will need to be different if you want Customers to still be able to see their issues in the Customer Portal.

I also choose to restrict who has the Administer Project permission. That permission may have been allocated to non-Jira Admins so that a team could self manage the Components and Releases for a project. But if you want to prevent all changes to the project then I recommend restricted that permission to a small group of Jira Administrators.

You'll also need to consider if you have Team Managed projects. The permissions for Team Managed projects are managed within each project separately. You would not be able to apply a global Permission Scheme to such projects.