How do I use/reuse user licenses as I have a continual flow of external contractors?

[Jay Lopatin]

We have a small company (2 users) but I work with about 12 contractors at a time and regularly use/lose contractors as skills sets are needed. (I do a lot of odesk hiring for skills) I would like to assign tasks (and Wiki access) as these contractors work with me for days/weeks/months. Once they leave I would like a history of their work. But, it seems silly to pay for license just to keep a history over time. Ideally, I would deactive them but show them in history.

My other idea would be to hire everyone in roles (as licenses) and keep them permanant as the user names changed over time to reflect the individual. Then each individual would have to sign their comments, tasks, and Wiki's manually to indicate who actually worked on each item. This seems an overly complicated way to do things.

But, unless I come up with a better idea I'll wind up with an ever growing user base of inactive users that is costing me ever increasing licensing costs. How should this be managed properly?

[J. Caldwell · Accepted solution]

Different versions you handle it differently. If it's Jira 5+ there is an "active" switch that you can uncheck.

Existance in jira-users or confluence-users counts against your license. Removing those groups will reduce your count.

[Jay Lopatin]

I'm using the On Demand version (I don't where the version # is) and I can't find any "active" switch. The only way switch I see is delete. But, if I choose "delete" it seems I need to first remove this user from all history - and I don't want to do that. How do companies with large turnover handle maintaining history while not paying for ever-increasing "dead" overhead?

[Norman Abramovitz]

Maybe you can disable the user and then you should be able to create a new user.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=253231663

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Managing+application+access

[Jay Lopatin]

According to the links you point me to your solution SHOULD work. However, despite removing this user's access to ALL applications AND removing him from ALL groups - he still shows up as a user and counts towards my license cost. Either I'm doing something wrong, JIRA/Confluence is not working as documented, or when I go to add another user and it tells me how many users already exist their counter is wrong. Thank you for your response - it really seemed to make sense to me.

[Norman Abramovitz]

Here is another linke about deactivating an user related to OnDemand. Take note of note about project leads and component leads.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Managing+Users#ManagingUsers-Deactivatingauser

If it is still not working, then contact support since it is suppose to.

[Lee Correll]

Probably a better answer:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AOD/Atlassian+OnDemand+licensing

notes that “The user count is calculated based on your application access settings, i.e. the number of users you grant access to a particular application. You can view the user count in the Application Access administration console.”

So the way for you to do it is to toggle the older users so that they don't have access to JIRA/Confluence/whatever and they won't count. It has nothing to do with user groups.

Your next question will probably be "is there a way to do this programmatically - like, with a script?" and the answer seems to be "nope." I can't find a reference to it in the REST API or in Bob Swift's CLI (using the previous SOAP interface) - so Atlassian hasn't provided a mechanism to do so.

[Sergio Storch]

Ecojay, , I didn t have this question before, but it s fortunate that you asked.

And Norman, thank you very much for your answer.

[Norman Abramovitz]

your welcome

[Brad Albrecht]

Can't you just remove them from the jira-users group? That should remove them from active licenses and not affect the existing issues. I have seen Jira hold an account against the license if the user was listed as a project lead (I think).

I ran into a simliar issue recently, but not exactly the same, so I am not positive it works, but worth a try.

[Jay Lopatin]

Good thought! But, I removed my test user from all groups and it still counts as a user.