Manage All Without Users

[Stephan Krasner]

I manage a plant that makes physical, custom products and I'd like to use Jira to organize different departments as other departments will not be able to access a computer. I'm looking to manage everything at a high level and then discuss it during morning meetings which is where it will be shifted around and modified.

Unfortunately it looks like to add other people, they require a seat for each one. All I really want is a representation of each department. Is there a way for me to do that?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Stephan Krasner 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Each licensed Jira user account is tied to an email address. If you are not using integration with an Identity Provider to manage your users, then that email address needs to be valid and have an accessible email inbox, so that password setting and account verification can be managed.

If you want other users to be able to login and work with the information in Jira, each such user will need their own account with a valid email so that a license can be granted and they can manage the account verification and password. If those departments don't need to be able to login and interact with Jira, then the users don't need an account.

Do you want to associate the items in Jira just with the department as a whole, or with individuals in the department? If you want to associate the items with the departments, you can leverage the Atlassian Team functionality.

https://support.atlassian.com/atlassian-account/docs/what-is-an-atlassian-team/

You can create a Team for each department and associate the Teams to the issues using the Team field. If you aren't concerned about associating work with individuals, then you don't need to add members to the team, and you don't need to set up additional users for Jira.

If you do want to associate issues/items with individuals, then how you do that will depend on what you want to be able to do with that individual's information and its relationship to the issue. For instance, if you want to Assign the work to an individual using the Assignee field, then the individual needs a licensed user account. If you don't want to leverage the Assignee field, you could create a custom field (free text or a selection list) and simply note the individual in that field. In the latter case the individual doesn't need a Jira account.

Let me know if you have additional questions based on the information I've provided.