Managed Accounts
Asked by Matt Woollett:

Hi guys,

I am hoping I am asking a question which is simple and something I am quite obviously missing. We have recently expanded onto Jira Service Desk Cloud, and we have registered our domain, and taken over our domain accounts.

Since doing this we could immediately see that some of the organisation have Trello Free edition accounts linked to their work email accounts. We also utilise Atlassian Access as our Identity Provider, which is great and works really well however.... After reading many articles it looks like Trello Free edition is charged for when using Atlassian Access, now we don't really have a business need for Trello and would simply want to remove it, but I cannot (after reading so many articles) find a way to remove or unlink the users from Trello Free Edition, has anyone else managed to find a way to do this?

It's import to note I don't want to or in most cases can't do the following:

- Change a users email address to something that isn't using our nomenclature

- De-activate a user (as they still need to access the IT service desk portion of our setup as the customer)

- Advise the users to move it to their personal accounts as it would be suggesting it is OK to move company data outside of our information sphere

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Matt


Answers:
author: Michael Pryor
body: "Advise the users to move it to their personal accounts as it would be suggesting it is OK to move company data outside of our information sphere"

The problem becomes - if they are using Trello for company needs and you want the security Access provides for tools that your employees use then there is no real resolution here given the constraints you laid out.   

My suggestion would be to pay for those users and their use of Access so that your company's accesss to Trello is protected by Access.   

The other option maybe is to tell those people to delete their Trello accounts?   

Obviously my stance is biased but I'm guessing those employees want to use Trello for things they do at work and we should try to find a solution that enables that versus trying to shutdown their use of an Atlassian tool.

comments: author: Matt Woollett
body: Hi Michael,

Firstly thank you for responding, its appreciated.

The problem I have is I am sure Trello is a great tool but as an IT admin, we have taken over our domain, and found that multiple users utilise this tool (something we weren't aware of, rightly or wrongly I guess).

They are all using the free edition, and after review it looks like only a couple of them continue to use the product with the remainder opening an account three years ago and not using it since. The issue I have is essentially I am having to pay for something that a user has signed up to, with the intention of it being free, but ultimately it no longer is, and we have no method of removing it because we don't want it, without making drastic changes, such as email address changes etc which I have subsequently found I can't do anyway because the email address is now sync'd with the identity provider?

You mention above that advise the user to delete the trello accounts, can you advise how I can do that without deleting their total access to Atlassian because if that's possible that would definitely be the optimum approach.

Many thanks,

Matt


author: Michael Pryor
body: It doesn't look like there is a way to delete just one products "account" once you have an Atlassian Account - only <https://support.atlassian.com/atlassian-account/docs/delete-your-atlassian-account/>

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2020/02/managing-trello-accounts-from-your-organization> Suggests deactivating their account and using a different email address for access for JSM access.


author: Michael Pryor
body: Thinking about this more, I think the heart of the issue is really

"If a user doesn't engage with an Atlassian product that is billable by Access, after some amount of time, why do we still have to pay for them?"

The non-billable nature of JSM portal accounts make this complex (because otherwise the answer would be 'if someone is inactive, then deactivate the account').


author: Matt Woollett
body: I think what I have an issue with is we own the domain, and they are now managed accounts right? So I should the ability to simply delete the Trello access, but that facility doesn't exist really so I feel like I am in essence being forced to pay for it when we don't want to, and had not budgeted for it.

I do appreciate your response, and I do kind of see where you're coming from when it comes to a company that utilised Trello as one of their products but for a company that had no awareness that Trello was in use, and does not want to use it, there no simple method to use the other great products with Atlassian with Access without a lot of time (and money) needed to be taken to find a work around with deleting managed accounts and then re-adding them etc, it just doesn't feel like a great user experience for both the IT admins, and the Jira users.

I hope this makes sense, and doesn't sound like a rant. Thanks again for your reply it is appreciated.


author: Michael Pryor
body: Oh good - I wasn't sure if this shipped yet but we finally shipped the feature you need: <https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/docs/understand-authentication-policies/>

see nonbillable policy. add your users you don't want to pay for there and you should be all set.


Tags: atlassian-guard

jira