Changing Usernames without messing up filters

[Roman Holdener]

Hi

We are currentely facing the following challange:

Our Jira Server instance ist connected with our Actice Directory. AD ist our user Directory for Jira. As usernames, we use our internal visa. Unfortunately, the visa can be reassigned to other employees a certain time after someone left the company. As Jira remembers usernames of inactive users and recovers an old account when a account with a known username is created, it happens, that new employees, who have a visum the was alredy used before  will be assigned with the inactive account. As a result of this, such users will have permission that they should not have and sometime they get mails from observed issues or similar.

To resolve that issue, we could just change the configuration of the user directory and use a unique attribute as username. Unfortunately, this will cause further problems, i.e. lots of filters and boards will have to be changed as a filter that filters for a certain user will no longer work. We have thousands of filters that would need to be updated manually. It is very likely, that changing the usernames uf all users will cause a variety of other problems as well.

Has anyone faced a similar problem before? How have you solved this? I am very thankfull for any idea how to solve this.

[Alexis Robert · Accepted solution]

Hi @Roman Holdener , 

one solution to this would be to change the username of someone leaving the company, this way even if another user is assigned their visa, there would not be any Jira data linked to it.

I know it's something you can do with Data Center : https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/anonymizing-users-992677655.html

If you need this for Jira Server, I would look at a database script probably to change the username to a random ID.

Let me know if this helps, 

--Alexis

[Roman Holdener]

Hi Alexis

Thank you very much for that suggestions.

Anonymizing users sounds interessting, and it seems to be possible in Server as well, but only from v. 8.14, currently, we are using the LTS version, wich is 8.4

But the database  script might actually work, I will check, if that will be possible and if it works. I'll keep you updated and mark your answer as accepted as soon as I know more.

Regards,
Roman

[Roman Holdener]

Hi

I did some more testing. It seems as since the last update we made, jira creates users whose usernames already exist with the value "JIRAUSER12345" as user_key instead of using the username as key. Therefore, I assume the problem has resolved itself and renaming will not be necessary.

Nevertheless we still seem to have the problem in Confluence. I guess I will contact Atlassians support concerning that topic.

@Alexis Robert Thank you for your input. It did not solve the problem directely, but led us to the right trace, therefore I mark your answer as accepted.

Regards,