To facilitate cross organizational collaboration, Atlassian provides an external user experience where users can “travel” out of their Home organization to work in another Host organization.
Recently, we have added a new feature called “Local profiles for external users”. This enables a Host organization to issue external users a customised profile.
The local profile helps better identify and associate external users with work items, pages, comments, mentions and more. An example use case is setting the Display name to respective local languages.
If “Local profiles for external users” is not used, external users will continue to simply default to the Home organization’s profile.
Note: This feature has been released on a limited basis. For further release updates please follow Provisioning and profile control for external users on the Atlassian Cloud roadmap.
Will accepting invitations from Host organizations result in extra fees for Home organizations?
The short answer is, No. Home organizations will never be billed extra fees for users accepting invites and accessing the Host organization.
When a Host organization invites a user to collaborate, they are offering to provision one of their licenses, which covers that invited user 100% for product access inside the Host organization.
Enterprise licenses include Atlassian Guard Standard. This means that Guard Standard coverage travels with the Enterprise licensed user globally, across all of the organizations they have been granted access - both Home and Host.
As a result, some external users may actually temporarily reduce their Home organization’s Guard bill. This occurs in Scenario B in the table below, where the Host organization provisions the external user with an Enterprise license.
By accepting an invitation by a Host organization to work in their Atlassian environment, at no time will a user or their Home organization incur additional charges.
Tips for managing external collaboration at scale
The current billable-user view in Atlassian Administration is the authoritative place to confirm the result for specific licensing configurations and policies for each organization.
Organization admins can view the current billable user count and bill estimate at any time by going to Atlassian Administration → Billing → Manage. On the Subscription details page, you’ll see the number of unique billable users and the bill estimate.
For a full walkthrough, see Manage your bill for Atlassian Guard Standard.
Although the Atlassian Guard billing changes outlined in this article are fully compliant with user access and billing policies, we do know some admins would like to be notified of changes.
Home and Host admins can use Automation for Atlassian Administration to build flows that fire when user-related events occur (such as a user being added or removed from a group, or a user becoming a managed account). These flows can be configured to send notifications, making them useful as a proxy notification for changes that may affect billing.
For a full list of available triggers and actions, see Available automation components for Atlassian Administration.
Plan carefully when managing external users at scale
Note that when invites are sent or received in large numbers, this can result in a lot of emails - to the extent that they may mistaken as spam.
When doing bulk invites, we always recommend asking the individuals involved to reach out and connect team members and admins across Home & Host organizations to give them the heads up. Its also a good opportunity to ask what else admins can do to help facilitate and foster cross org collaboration, while also staying safe, compliant and managing costs.
