📣 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:

[Adam Abrahams]

Thanks for the heads up and details regarding the App change to admin console. Makes a lot of sense and love that we'll be able to see all apps across all products (Jira, Confluence, etc...). Is there a change to the heading navigation bars in Jira and Confluence? ie. The App drop down will be removed?

[Julia Daehne]

Hi @Adam Abrahams thanks for your feedback. I can confirm that the app drop in the product will remain.  

[Kelsey LaMastres _Appfire_]

Hi @Julia Daehne - Will admins be able to search for and discover new apps from within the admin space (i.e. "Explore more apps" menu item in the Apps dropdown)? Or will they only see the apps they have already started a trial for or purchased? 

[Julia Daehne]

Hi @Kelsey LaMastres _Appfire_ once the in-product app management experience is deprecated, we will re-direct the user to the Connected Apps experience in a new tab where user will see the list of all installed apps. There is also a 'discover new apps' link at the top of the page which will link to the Marketplace. 

The 'find new apps' link within the product will remain and when selected open the in-product Marketplace, ie when selected within Confluence only Confluence apps will be shown.

[Ajay Singh {Appfire}]

Hi @Julia Daehne ~ Could you please clarify whether the endpoints for installing and uninstalling apps will change?

Thanks!

[Chris Williams]

Hi @Ajay Singh {Appfire}  - we don't expect these endpoints to change any time soon, the backend remains mostly the same in terms of those operations. See this related post.

[Hailin Test]

Not easy to use. Stop trail button should be added to Connected apps page like the old mange app page. Stopping/uninstalling plugin is much harder and there is no single view to check all plugins status. 

[Julia Daehne]

Hi @Hailin Test we appreciate you taking the time to raise this concern. We have heard similar concerns from other users and I am pleased to confirm that we are actively working on making the app actions more visible and immediately actionable on the app overview page.

This means you won't have to click into an app's detail page first. The change will most likely become visible in January. Please bear with us

I would also like to call out that there is an "give feedback" button available at the top of the app overview page. You can use this for any future concerns, suggested improvements or to simply tell us what worked well 

[Jens Schumacher]

@Julia Daehne where do customers apply promo codes in the new experience? I haven't been able to find it and the Atlassian documentation on the topic has been wrong for years. 

[Julia Daehne]

@Jens Schumacher promo codes should be applied in the billing console, not Connected Apps. I checked the docs and you are right in saying that the process described is incorrect. I have raised a ticket to have this looked at

[Julia Daehne]

Hi @Jens Schumacher is this helpful https://support.atlassian.com/subscriptions-and-billing/docs/understand-the-improved-atlassian-billing-experience/ ?

[Mike Maurer]

Oh, interesting! I'm really looking forward to this change.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Julia Daehne  - looking forward to this! I just had a survey call with an Atlassian Product team and they reminded me of this ... I will use it a bit more frequently.

Glad the custom connect app feature and endpoints and nav will remain as is ... 

Also, thanks for clarifying the roles/permissions. That is very good to know ...

Looking forward to this and more!

[Yatish Madhav]

@Julia Daehne  / @Chris Williams  - i already have 1 feature request or improvement with the new view. Please can I ask you to log this accordingly if possible?

When i click on the 3 dots > Manage, I am taken away from the listing to a full page of lots of white space. I think:

- it would be better to open perhaps in a 1/3 - 2/3 column layout with the app listing on the left and the full app details, description, settings, etc on the right. OR the previous accordion was also nice.

- it would be helpful to have the options as below in the 3 dot menu in the listing too along with links to the marketplace listing and a Support & Issues link too

- previously I could filter by the below. how do i do that now? There is only a Installed on and Installed  by filter on the new listing page.

Thank you in advance

Yatish