Does 10K synced user limit apply to customers?

[Matt Harford]

Hi There, 

We are rolling out Jira Service Management to our University, and I am wondering if anyone has any wisdom to share on the 10k user limit. 

We've set up SSO, and are currently syncing our employees (about 6,000). But I'd also like to sync all of our students (~60,000). We will never assign more than 500-1000 licenses of Jira Service Management. Will we be able to sync all of our users (between 60 and 70k) so that they can sign in using SSO, and have pre-filled profiles, etc. as long as we don't have licenses assigned to them?

Thanks,

Matt

[Sharon Helms]

@Matt Harford and @Dan W ,

Our Jira Service Management launch team found this to be a complicated area, but here's what I've been able to piece together. 

Backtracking a little bit, it's a known issue from the Jira Service Management side that the customer portal doesn't currently work with SSO. Customer accounts are stored locally and it's not possible to sync their accounts with an Identity Provider. Here is the feature request for this ability that you can vote and comment on:

• SSO integration with JIRA Service Desk

The above feature request suggests a workaround to migrate customer accounts to Atlassian accounts. Then remove the product access, so customers won't count as a license or access private information.

So going back to whether there is a limit on customers -- yes, you can have unlimited customers in the Jira Service Management portal, but if you want to manage and sync them from your identity provider, there is a # limit.

This isn't my area of expertise, but when our team investigated it we came up against the limitation in Atlassian Access to sync only up to 10,000 users from your own identity provider, as found in this article:

• Understand user provisioning

It's been about a year since we investigated this, and it's an area that continues to change, so it would be worth it to reach out to Atlassian Support --. If you find a way to workaround, or info about this becoming available soon, please share in the Community! Would love to hear how other university teams are getting this to work. Thanks, Sharon

[Dan W]

@Matt Harford @Sharon Helms ,  We are getting ready to start the migration to cloud and this post is a bit concerning to me.  From what I have read customers are unlimited the user limit is on licensed users.  https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/pricing?tab=cloud-new.  Am I missing something with what you are doing?  We currently have over 40,000 customers defined in crowd, but are under the 10,000 limit in licensed users.  Am I going to have a problem with importing and working with all of our current customers?

Thanks

Dan

[Matt Harford]

@Dan W 

 This is what I'm not clear on - I had read something last week which implied we could sync all our customers, and there was no limit (url below). But I haven't tried it, because I don't want to break the syncing on our production environment. 

I may open a support request just to be sure - it would make things much, much simpler for me if we are able to sync over all our customers.

This post, with comments from Atlassian, implies that the limit only applies to licensed users: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Atlassian-Access-questions/5000-is-the-limit-for-AzureAD-Sync/qaq-p/1325375

But @Sharon Helms seems to have received a different response from Atlassian.

[Sharon Helms]

Hi @Matt Harford , I also work at a University and we had hoped to sync/create managed customer accounts for all of our students and employees, with similar numbers. 

When we contacted Atlassian support we heard that yes, the 10K limit does apply to customers. Recently it was increased from 5K to 10K, and they said they are working to increase the limit to 20,000+ users, but they did not have an ETA for when that would be available. (And like you, we would also need much larger numbers than 20,000).

We chose to leave our primary service desk and help articles open to all without log in, and enabled requests to be opened by the same email address we have used for years. 

While we encourage self-sign up to create an Atlassian account, not many of our users have done that. Most of our enterprise software solutions are set up to use SSO, so it's a disappointment that this is not yet possible with our support portal.

We would be very interested in any workarounds you might come across, and feel free to reach out if you'd like to talk more about rolling out Jira Service Management at a University. We introduced it to our campus in 2019 for campus IT support.  Best wishes, Sharon