Can Confluence, Jira etc. support two levels of users?

[Cathy]

I am evaluating Confluence, Jira and other Atlassian products and I need to know if these can support two levels of users; development team (who can do everything) and sales, support and operations teams (who can enter issues/requirements and review status, but do nothing else).

This is important for licensing.

Cathy

[Faisal · Accepted solution]

Hi Cathy,

Yes I am afraid that, that will be the case.

In order for a user to create an issue in your JIRA instance, then the user will have to login to the application first. And if the user is able to login to JIRA, then the user will be counted towards your license limit.

But it should be possible for us to allow anonymous users to create issues in JIRA, means that they don't have to login to the application first, by configuring the Create Issues permission in the permission scheme. However, the reporter of the created issue will be registered under Anonymous, instead of the actual person (or user) which created the issue.

I hope that this clarifies the matter.

[Faisal]

Hi Kathy,

I believe that this will be the case. If we need the user to login to JIRA to create the issues, then the user will need an account in JIRA which will contribute towards the license limit.

But there's probably a workaround for this, but it's not a clean one. If the JIRA instance is only accessed internally, then probably we can grant the Create Issues to "Group (Anyone)", which means that users will be able to create issues without logging in to the application. And the issues will be registered under anonymous user. The user can then access their issue anytime (grant the Browse Projects permission to Group (Anyone)) and review the status of the issue as well.

Thanks.

[Cathy]

Does that mean all users need licenses? If we have, say, 20 in the development group and, say, 100 for all groups combined then we need 100 licenses? Even though 80 of them are only submitting issues and reviewing their status.

[Faisal]

Hi Cathy,

It may not be possible for us to have different levels of users in JIRA or Confluence. However, it should be possible for us to define the roles and permissions for each of the users in JIRA.

And as for our requirements here, probably you can try to group the users together accordingly, ie: the developer users are grouped together, and same goes to the sales/support/operations users.

You may then configure the permission schemes and grant the groups the necessary permissions (Create Issues, Browse Projects permission, etc) as required.

For your reference, you may kindly refer to the following documentations:
- Managing Groups

- Managing Project Permisisons

I hope that this will help.