An update on the centralized user management experience rollout

[#1]

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: Compass basic user role Jira Product Discovery contributor role Jira Service Management stakeholder role [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.

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

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) 😕

[Dave Liao]

@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?

[Richard White [TechTime]]

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]

@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.