What happens to existing users when migrating over to Atlassian Access for SSO?

[Joel Hasan]

We are currently running JIRA servicedesk and JIRA on the cloud, and about to enable Atlassian Access for SSO. What happens to the existing user accounts (permissions, groups etc.) when we turn on SSO? Will their passwords be wiped and require them to instantaneously login via SSO, or will there be the option to use manual passwords until we are comfortable that SSO is performing correctly on migrate people in batches?

[Dave Meyer · Accepted solution]

Hi @Joel Hasan,

Unfortunately it's not possible to progressively enable SSO. Once you enable your SSO configuration, all user login attempts will be delegated to your SSO provider. However, users' local Atlassian account passwords are not deleted. If you were to disable your SSO provider, users could once again log in using their previous Atlassian account password.

We highly recommend that you ensure that at least once organization administrator has an account that is not on a verified domain, so that if something goes wrong in your SSO configuration, you can log in to disable it.

We are planning to introduce better support for testing SSO configurations in the future, but I recognize that won't help you in the short term rolling this out. 

Regards,

Dave

[Joel Hasan]

Hi Dave,

Thank you very much for the response, this is very helpful!

Joel

[Patrik Fontana]

Hi @Dave Meyer ,

We are pretty much interested as well to understand what is the process from the user standpoint when SSO is enabled. Will the user get notified? Will the user go to few steps and if yes what would those be?

Thanks.

[Dave Meyer]

@Patrik Fontana Users are notified when you verify a domain, but not when you enable SSO.

However, in order to enable SSO, you must first verify the domain, and once you have verified the domain, you have access to all user email addresses on that domain (and that will be covered by your SSO configuration). This gives you the ability to send your own notifications to all users.

There are no steps for end users. Once SSO is enabled, the Atlassian account login screen will simply redirect them to your SSO login screen the next time they log in.

[Francis Vidal]

Is the ability to login via SSO assigned per-user?

[Dave Meyer]

Hi @Francis Vidal

Not at this time. Once SSO is enabled, all managed accounts under your organization will login via your configured SSO provider.

Regards,

Dave

[George Kuznetsov]

Hi @Dave Meyer We also use Jira Cloud and enabled SSO. The Phone app for Jira still lets me log into the account with no requests for authentication. But it works for all new users. How I can fix it?

BR,

George

[Dave Meyer]

Hi @George Kuznetsov ,

We don't currently log out existing users from their mobile devices when SSO is enabled. If you have SSO enabled, then if you log out on your mobile device and log back in, it should take you through the SSO login flow.

Cheers,

Dave 

[George Kuznetsov]

@Dave Meyer Thanks for prompt response! I have at least one user who logged out a number of different times and it let him back in. He deleted and reinstalled and it still allows him to log in. Any suggestions?

[Dave Meyer]

Hey @George Kuznetsov ,

If you are confident that the user logs in through SSO on the web, but when they use the same email address to log in through the mobile app, they are able to log in without using SSO, then I would recommend contacting our support team. This is not expected behavior.