Importing and preserving user related fields where users no longer exist

[Steve Rubin]

Greetings all,

We are a small startup spun-off from a large company, and we inherited a project we will continue to develop.

We were given CSV extracts from the large company and tried to import them and noticed that users mentioned in the import must be defined in Jira before importing, otherwise user oriented fields like creator, assignee or comment will not get imported.

There are only a handful of us, but the large company export references almost 500 users. For giving tickets context, we would like to preserve the identification of those 500 users somehow in our new Jira.

We thought, before importing, we'll just substitute those users in the CSV file with a slightly tweaked email username which substitutes our small company for the large company domain.

But then we wondered: will we need licenses for 500 users even though there are just 7 of us??  That would become prohibitively expensive.

Maybe one way to resolve it would be to tweak the 500 users in the large company extract to all be something like unknownuser@oursmallcompany.com, but again, we would hate to loose specific user context in those tickets.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

Steve

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

Hi @Steve Rubin,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

This is what I would do instead of having to create all those 500 users and the need to have a subscription that covers them too. I would create a custom text field and import the user to that field. This way you have a reference to the users, but you do not have to create an account for them. 

[Steve Rubin]

Awesome Mikael, that would work! Thank you so much!

Steve

[Trudy Claspill]

Another alternative is to add a Comment to the CSV input data for each issue and put the original user info into that.

[Steve Rubin]

Thanks for the suggestion Mikael. As well, thanks for confirming the user licensing/pricing model. I made a licensing/pricing inquiry to make sure I understood the billing model, in essence asking would inactive users defined for an import be considered users for licensing but never received a reply. Best regards, Steve

[Steve Rubin]

Sorry, I meant to thank you Trudy! (as well as Mikael who also responded)