Discovered Products Alert

[Mark Gillespie]

I have had an email from my cloud instance telling ,me that 

"Now that you manage accounts for my-org, you can find out when your users administer products outside your organization. Use these details to stay ahead of where company data is stored and keep track of the number of users with product access.

For admin contact information, click Review all products. From there, you can decide whether you want to start a discussion about transferring these products to your organization."

Clicking the link, shows me this.   I literally have no idea what this means.  What has this user done?  Is this good, bad, indifferent?     I also can't do anything about this, unless we buy an Enterprise license (usual Atlassian up-sell, make something annoying, charge to get rid of it).

What has this user done?  Should I be concerned?  How to undo it?   Does this user really have 8 other users in whatever he has managed to create?

I'm thinking he has created his own free tier confluence instance, rather than using the provided instances and spaces, and invited all his colleagues?   If this is the case, how is this allowed? 

[marc -Collabello--Phase Locked- · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mark Gillespie ,

Probably this user has indeed created a new Confluence instance.

Atlassian considers users "their Atlassian users" and not your orgs users.  So all users can create new instances.  Sometimes this happens by non technical users without realizing the implications.

What you see is part of the newer controls Atlassian is giving to org admins to get more insight into what users of their org are doing.

[Mark Gillespie]

(deleted)

[Coley Anderson]

We keep running into this in our org, it is very frustrating. What I have been doing, I add myself as the org admin in that instance and I remove the user that created it. Then I do the following:

• Make sure you are in that org and not your actual company org
• Go to Billing and click on Manage under Actions on the product
• Hit the cancel subscriptions button
• Atlassian will have you type CANCEL in the box then ask you why
  • I have been selecting 'Other' and putting that this was a discovered products instance that was created by mistake from a user
• After that, you will see a cancellation pending message and it will give you a date when it will be complete
• From here - you just have to wait. This can take several weeks, they are trying to give folks time to grab data before it is gone. You will be able to delete the org once the products have been fully removed.

[Mark Gillespie]

Ok, I spoke to the user, and as suspected, they inadvertently created their own  standalone Confluence instance :-(   It's pretty poor this is allowed to happen on managed accounts.

The next question, how do we get this mess cleaned up?  I have had a teams session with them today, and we went through to try and find out how to delete a product, and couldn't find it, in the many many layers of settings.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Mark Gillespie If they want to keep what they have done, you can export they space they have created in the other instance and import them into your corporate instance. See https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/import-a-confluence-cloud-space/ 

As far as removing the unwanted space, you (or it might need to be the user who created the instance) could work with Atlassian Support.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Mark Gillespie To add to the response from @marc -Collabello--Phase Locked-, it looks like you could control user's ability to do this in the Enterprise edition.

Since you don't have that, though, you might want to simply contact the person who created the instance to find out why they did it and why they felt the need to do that instead of just creating a new space within your existing instance. Then you can decide what to do.

[Mark Gillespie]

They haven't created any content in there, they didn't understand the difference between sites and spaces, and Atlassian unhelpfully walked them through creating a standalone instance.

I'm pretty disappointed this is how Atlassian works these days, we never has these cheap tricks on the server product.

I doubt Atlassian support will help, it's not my site, and it's easier to simply pull out the GDPR card.  

I will tell the user he has to contact Atlassian support to get the product and site deleted, which isn't really a great look given how easily they guided him into getting into trouble...