Administrators group VS <product-name>-admins groups?

[Malin Fremnell]

Hi.

When I create a new Site, in Cloud, a couple of default Admin groups are created, such as Administrator groups and in my case, jira-admins-<site-name> groups.

I don't really understand what the function of the Administrator Group is. 

In this documentation, Give users admin permissions | Atlassian Support it is clear that there are two types of Product Admins but that they behave differently. And Admins that belongs to the administrators group – can administer product settings, and they also have access to the product themselves through this group.

But I can't figure out what the difference is IRL. I've tested to add a member to both the administrators group and the jira-admins-<site-name> groups. The user in the administrators group doesn't get any access to the product. 

I feel that they seem to be behaving the same. It's also a bit strange that Administrators groups doesn't have any description like the other default groups. Could it be that the Administrators group does something in the background that I don't understand? 

So..is there anyone else that could give me some understanding on this?

Best regards 
Malin 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Malin Fremnell,

Don't feel forced to use those groups if you don't see or even objectively have a benefit from it.

These separate groups can make sense, though in larger organisations. As you have noted, your site may consist of multiple products: Jira, Confluence, Atlas, Bitbucket, ... Some companies do have separate administrators for these different products. They are fundamentally different things in many ways and sometimes are managed by dedicated folks.

But the opposite is true as well. I know many companies where all Atlassian applications are managed by the same core team, who all share the same admin powers. 

In the first case, it makes total sense to manage your admins separately by product. Since the product name is in these default groups, you can easily distinguish between the pools of product dedicated superheroes. In the second case, the more generic Administrator group is better suited to group all your admins. It would not be that intuitive to use the jira-administrators group for Confluence, for example.

Hope this helps! 

[Malin Fremnell]

Hi Walter and thanks for your answer. 

I understand that I am not forced to use them and that you may need different admin groupd for different products. What I was really thinking about is that atlassian writes in the link I put in my post that these two groups have different functions and I do not feel that this is really true. 

//Malin