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An update on the centralized user management experience rollout

Hi all,

Earlier this year, we shared that we would be migrating existing cloud customers to a new and improved centralized user management experience, and we wanted to update you on the latest state of this work, and some changes to our plan.

Background

One of the main goals of centralized user management was to provide you with a simplified, cross product, consolidated user management experience. In particular, we wanted to give org admins who manage multiple site-level directories within an organization a single user directory view at the organization level.

Since then, we’ve migrated the majority of our existing cloud customers to this new experience, and we’re pleased to say that over 99% of all customers are using this new experience, for which we’ve had great feedback.

What are we doing?

We will not migrate the remaining 1% of customers to the new, centralized user management experience. This cohort includes customers with multiple sites, and are therefore typically larger, enterprise-sized organizations. Many of you in this group have shared with us that centralization isn’t always the best fit.

In fact, the isolation of sites in our original user management model has its own benefits. There is often a need—especially among enterprise admins—for isolation between users and content in varied situations, including:

  • Large multinational corporations operating business units in different regions across the world, who need to separate users and content

  • Client-based organizations that create new sites for each engagement and need to manage the users within those sites separately

  • Organizations that have specific sites and/or projects that require isolation from other sites due to privacy, risk, or compliance restrictions

  • And more…

Many of you have told us that you want to be able to isolate groups of users in separate directories (in the same way you achieve this today via multiple sites), while still getting access to some of the new features in the centralized user management experience. With that in mind, we’re working to bring features from the centralized user management experience to customers on the original user management experience as well as greater isolation and control to customers on both experiences.

Ultimately, this will bring all customers to the same experience, combining the best capabilities across both current states into a single state that all customers will benefit from.

What happens now?

If you’re unsure which user management experience your organization currently has, you can confirm that and see the admin roles available to you by reading through this documentation.

If you’re on the new, centralized user management experience…

No significant changes will take place in the near term. We will work to bring you the option of more isolation in the future, and we will share more details on this work within the next few months.

If you’re on the original user management experience…

Your organization will not be migrated to the new user management experience. Instead, we will be shifting our focus to providing greater isolation controls within organizations for customers on all user management experiences.

In the meantime, we have already begun improving the original (more isolated) user management experience so that it has feature parity with the new (more centralized) user management experience. We will ensure you can access the same benefits of the new user management experience, without sacrificing isolation. You can expect to see the following features roll out to the original user management experience by mid-2025:

  • [Available now] Group rename: provides the flexibility to rename a Jira group - learn more

  • [Coming soon] Centralized view of users: allows org admins to manage users across sites & products in the org, while also keeping users and groups separated for privacy or security reasons at a site level

  • [Coming soon] Delegated admin roles: allows admins to delegate user and product access management to additional admins, through specific admin roles.

  • [Coming soon] New product roles in Compass, Jira Product Discovery, and Jira Service Management: gives admins more granular controls over user permissions and non-billable users through roles like:

  • [Coming soon] Organization level APIs: allows admins to manage users and groups across an entire organization

Ultimately, our goal is to offer all customers the flexibility to configure user management as your organization requires.

Questions, comments, or feedback?

If you have questions about this update or would like to provide feedback on our plans for providing more isolation and control to enterprises, please leave a comment and I’ll follow up with you.

6 comments

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Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_
Solutions Partner
Solution Partners provide consulting, sales, and technical services on Atlassian products.
November 27, 2024

Interesting decision for sure... 👀

I have a question about the following:

Since then, we’ve migrated the majority of our existing cloud customers to this new experience, and we’re pleased to say that over 99% of all customers are using this new experience, for which we’ve had great feedback.

Are we here talking only about Enterprise customers or generally all customers on any plan? I'm asking because we're managing a lot of organizations, and it's more like 50-50 when it comes to original and centralized user management. And most of them are not Enterprise customers.
This is mostly because these environments have sandboxes turned on and that's 'blocking' the migration. (which no one is really happy about) 😕

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Dave Liao
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
November 27, 2024

@Rob Saunders - Splitting your dev team to maintain two separate user management experiences doesn't sound ideal. 🤔

Hopefully there are plans to eventually consolidate to the new centralized user management experience, but perhaps with controls/features to allow for separations that the original user management experience permits?

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Richard White _TechTime_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
November 27, 2024

I think the 99% number might be a bit misleading - it may be true overall, but I suspect as soon as you have orgs that have been on cloud more than a couple of years, or more than one site, the numbers might be very different.

We see something like 1/3 of our customers for our app are using the old user management experience.

I understood one of the key blockers was the ability to merge multiple organisations - is this something that is ever planned to be unblocked for the new user experience with the new isolation features you want to add to the new user experience?

Rob Saunders
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 27, 2024
@Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ @Richard White _TechTime_ - Yes, both of these are true. Overall we have millions of cloud organisations on our new user management and only ~5k orgs who haven't been migrated, meaning that less than 1% of orgs are on the original user management experience. When it comes to complex, multi site orgs though, Enterprises are well represented in this minority cohort. This is the cohort for which the feedback has been strong, that centralised user management is not the best fit
The cohort you speak of @Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ - 1 site plus a sandbox - is included here, but if user isolation is not a requirement for these customers, they can move to the new user management through temporary removal and recreation of their sandbox, and through working with our support team.
@Dave Liao - Exactly. The plan outlined here is to consolidate both experiences so that we're not supporting 2 seperate experiences in the future - either for customers, which is confusing, or internally as a dev team. The consolidated state will provide the simplified model of centralized user management alongside extra isolation controls for those who need them.
@Richard White _TechTime_ - Org Consolidation is available today, but as a high touch process through our support team, and currently has size limitations. This new model above will make consolidation available, and simpler for all organisations.
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Benjamin Horst
Rising Star
Rising Star
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November 28, 2024

Hello Rob,

has Atlassian already found a solution for their problem with the merge of two organizations that have multiple sites and a different user managements?

See: "Is it technically possible to merge my organizations" 

Probably one of the edge cases that hangs at exactly the same spot that Atlassian got stuck at when trying to migrate the last 1%. 

Unfortunately we have ran into exactly this issue when evaluating a merge. I have seen that you even added additional edge cases to the edge case in which the support "may be able to help us", for example when using Atlassian Guard.

The only way is to go back to the "old" user management with the newer instance when we need to merge with one of the 1% orgs. 

Sometimes it sucks to not be one of the 99%. 

edit: Oh, I have seen that Richard has raised the same question and you replied already. Sorry, I didn't read thorughly before. 

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Darryl Lee
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
December 3, 2024

Joining the party late, but yeah, 1%er here, and not the filthy rich kind.

We really wanted to get to Vortex (c'mon, that's so much fun and easier to say and type than "Centralized User Management Experience"), mainly for the new User access admin role, but also because a certain EAP to address JSDCLOUD-5782 - Support linking non same domain JSD Cloud instances as knowledge base has a prereq that you're on Vortex. (Because oh, probably they depend on having the same userbase.)

But oof, 20000 users max? We were told you can't migrate to Vortex with more than that, and every sites userbase is unique, even if the emails (AND root Atlassian account) are the same!

We easily exceed that with:

  • A Jira migrated from a 10-yo Server instance where we brought along TONS of users who are long gone, but are associated with tickets are Reporters/Assignees/Commenters, and hence undeleteable.
  • Confluence with many of the same users.
  • Sandboxes with the same sets of users.

But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is the max 2000 groups.

Are you kidding me? We just switched from SCIM to Azure AD for Nested Groups (which also needs a rename. How about Microsoft Graph?) so that we could sync around 5000 groups. But wait, multiply that by 3 instances + 3 sandboxes, and you get 30000 groups. (So even if I cleaned up empty "local" groups, we're nowhere close to where we need to be.)

All this is to say, sure, that's a lot of users and groups to "merge". I get it.

But @Dave Liao is 100% right that maintaining two different codebases sounds like not fun.

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