User Admin Question

[Kallan Sanders]

I have a unique User Admin question... 

I have a small group of contractors that have been using Jira within my Organization for about a year.  They are logging in with their company email address (johndoe@randomcompany.com). 

Users from my org use SSO with our company email address (jim@mycompany.com).  

HR/IT wants the contractors to start using one of our email addresses and SSO to log in moving forward.  So... "c-johndoe@mycompany.com" ("c-" indicates contractor).  

My question is how do I make these changes and retain the history that has built up within their old accounts?  I have thought out a few options, but not sure if these are even doable.  Figured I would ask the community.  

1. Create the new accounts and then copy over settings, queries, etc., then deactivate the old accounts.  

2. Is there a way to change their current username/email so that they are aligned with the new method?  

3. Is there a way to merge accounts?

Any advice is very much appreciated.  

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Kallan Sanders 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I'll address the easiest question first.

#3. No, there is no way to merge multiple Atlassian Cloud accounts into one. And that might not actually be what would need to be done in this case. A user's Atlassian Cloud account is global. It can be used to give them access to multiple sites and products. And the domains in these external contractors accounts may have been claimed by their own companies. Would you want another company to be able to obliterate your company's Atlassian user accounts through merges?

#2. If the external contractor accounts are managed by the individual users (vs. by their employers or another identity provider) then they could update their email addresses themselves. However, if your company is using an integration with an identity provider to create the accounts in Atlassian Cloud for your users from your domain, then that could lead to a conflict if their new account already exists, created by you.

Which leaves you with...

#1. You can create a new Atlassian Cloud account using an email domain that you have claimed. There is no method to transfer issue history and comments from one account to another. You could change the values in all User Picker type fields from the old user account to the new user account through a variety of techniques (bulk updates and automation rules). You could then remove the product/site access for the original accounts that use external domain email addresses. The comments and history will still show the information associated with the original account, as long as that account is not deleted entirely from Atlassian Cloud.