📣 Cloud admins, we're making app management easier

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Cloud Admins 👋

Starting September 2024, we will transition from an in-product to a centralised cloud app management experience in admin.atlassian.com. Admins will be able to view and manage apps in a single view and continue to run all manage app tasks previously done in the product in admin.atlassian.com.

The final deprecation of the in-product app management feature will occur in February 2025.

Note: The change will also impact admin roles, as outlined in the table further below.

Current in-product "manage apps" experience

Confluence

 

Jira

Future admin.atlassian.com "manage apps" experience

Why we’re making this change

We’ve heard feedback from admins who find it easier to manage all apps, regardless of product, in one centralised area. They prefer an experience where all apps are accessible without any context switching.

We are therefore moving from an in-product app management experience to a centralised app management location under admin.atlassian.com. You will still be able to access the manage app experience through the product as you do today.

This experience will help admins save time, while also providing a more intuitive interface for the frequent app management admin tasks.

This is only the beginning as we are planning to further enhance the manage app experience over time.

Summary of changes

Role	Permissions	Changes after migration
Organization admin	An organization admin is the highest level of admin and can complete any administrative task in Atlassian Administration. They are the only admins with access to the organization’s settings, including security settings, and are responsible for managing users and groups within their organization.	No change
Site admin	A site admins can manage billing, add products, and manage apps for a given set of sites. Site admins can't manage product access for the sites they administer.	No change
User access admin	User access admins have limited access to Atlassian Administration and are able to manage user access to the products they administer. They do not have billing permissions or other permissions of site admins.	No change
Product admin	A product admin can manage administration settings within a specific product. They don’t have access to Atlassian Administration.	After migration, product admins required to manage apps need to have the site or org admin role assigned to them, depending on what is most appropriate for your org’s unique requirements. Find out here how to change a user’s admin permission

What’s next?

There is no required action needed for customers as these changes will take effect automatically. However, we encourage organization admins to review admin role assignments ahead of this change to determine what is most appropriate.

[Kieren _SmolSoftware_]

Big change @Julia Daehne !

Will this affect Product Admins ability to install apps?

Do Marketplace app developers need to do anything to ensure their apps still function the same way?

[Julia Daehne]

Hi Kieren, great to see you on the app developer side!

To answer your questions: product admins can only install 3LO integrations - unless they are blocked from doing so by their site or org admin. This will not be affected by this change.

App functionality will not be affected by this change.

The only call out for partners is that license testing for certain apps will be moving to admin.atlassian.com. You can read up on it here https://community.developer.atlassian.com/t/we-are-making-app-management-easier-for-our-cloud-admins/83303

[Jari Sanders]

Hi @Julia Daehne 

Could you share with us the big why? What feedback or data resulted in this project becoming a project? 

In the Developer community post you mention that customer feedback suggests this change is acceptable. Could you share with us how this feedback was gathered? The fact you state the response suggests it's 'acceptable' worries me, as the surveys that are sent out by Atlassian generally do not contain unbiased objective questioning and 'acceptable' does not sound convincing at all.

Another thing that is shocking to me is how little attention seems to be given to Atlassians very own Atlaskit guidelines. How is it possible that this change comes with 2 screens with a dropdown menu with only 1 dropdown item, while your very own guidelines clearly state to use this component when you have 5 - 15 items to choose from. https://atlassian.design/components/dropdown-menu/usage

[Julia Daehne]

Hi @Jari Sanders , thanks for your interest in the topic. We did not send out any surveys. Instead we have conducted face to face interviewed with several customers  over the past months to obtain insight on pain points regarding app management. A single app management experience was one of the top mentioned topics. 

Regarding the dropdown item comment it would be helpful for me to understand which drop down you are referring to please

[Jari Sanders]

[Kieren _SmolSoftware_]

@Julia Daehne  it’s certainly different on this side! 😂

This is an exciting change, something customers have been asking for a long time. I’m glad it’s finally going to be delivered! Good luck with the rollout 👍

[Julia Daehne]

Hi @Jari Sanders thx for confirming. Yes you are right this one as well as some other drop downs within Atlassian still have less than 5 items

[Jari Sanders]

@Julia Daehne Sorry but your reply only makes me worry more about the way of working that's going on. Do you agree with me it's highly worrying how these things go past several layers of QA and reviews and are still released, and are included in the screenshots that are shared along with the message that this is something new and improved?

I like improvements, but this is simply not a finished improvement. This is not just about going against your own guidelines in terms of how dropdowns should be used, it's a theme of releasing things that are not finished, and then ignoring it for years, only to repeat the same thing 5 years later.

[Sam Leatherdale]

@Julia Daehne Will it be possible to manually upload a Connect app descriptor in the Atlassian Admin interface, similar to the existing "Upload app" button?

EDIT: Found the answer, yes it is possible under the Settings tab: