JIRA Admin User Name - Is workaround a good option.

Marchelle Cain April 28, 2014

Hello,

I am the admin for my JIRA account and now that we are adding client, we want to change my name and other team members to be prefaced with our compay initials for clarity. I have researched the forums on here and see that changing the admin name is no easy feat, almost next to impossible.

I wanted to know if I created a temporary TEST user, and gave that profile all of my rights (admin, developer, ect) and deleted my current profile and created a new one with the correct name and gave myself all the same accesses back if that would be a feasible work around.

The catch is, I am the author of pretty much everything in our JIRA on demand, and am not sure if deleting me, would then delete all the issues comments workflows, etc that I have created. Please advise.

2 answers

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
BenjiI
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
April 29, 2014

According to Matthew B. Doar (Practical JIRA Administration), this will be the effect of deleting a user:

"If you have simply created a user and made an error entering the username, then deleting the user and starting again is the best approach. But once a JIRA user is active, then deleting a user is not allowed while there are issues assigned to the user or reported by the user. Deleting a user also removes useful historical information from issues."

The author also advises to use the following steps when changing a username:

1. First, create a new JIRA user account with the correct username.

2. Make sure that the old and new user accounts are members of the same JIRA groups.

3. Delete any shared filters and subscriptions for the old account and recreate them

for the new account. Prior to JIRA 5.1, you’ll have to log in as the user to see how

they are defined. JIRA 5.1 introduced the ability to search for shared filters and

subscriptions.

4. If the old account is used directly in any notification or permission schemes or

workflows, then change those too. It’s hard to find all the users in workflows, which

is a good reason not to embed usernames in workflows.

5. If the user is a project lead for any projects, then change those projects to use the

new account. JIRA also checks for this when deleting a user.

6. If the user might have been added to a project role directly, perhaps as a project

administrator, change the role to use the new account. You can check this at Ad‐

ministration→Users: find the user, and click on Project Roles.

Once the new account is ready, then you can use a search to find all the issues assigned
to the old account and assign them to the new account using Tools→Bulk Change. You’ll
also need to do the same thing for issues reported by the old account. Both of these
changes require you to have the right permissions for all the issues involved, or the bulk
edit action will be unavailable.
0 votes
Boris Georgiev _Appfire_
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
April 29, 2014

Deleting the old user will break some parts of your JIRA. See here https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/205294/how-to-rename-user-in-jira-ondemand

Better "retire"/deactivate the old user.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer