Changing System Default Groups

[James Parkin]

Hi all,

As part of my service portfolio, I've recently taken on the JML process for our Atlassian environment.

I noticed its a bit of a mess, and coming from an AD background, I decided to clean the hell out of it, and create some logical groupings.

so i have a load of new groups I have created (examples below);

og-internal-xxx

sg-jira-systemadmin

etc

I want to put the SG's in, and wipe out the old groups.  However, when I am in certain bits, there are things that lead me to believe that the default goups are somehow hard coded in the background.  

See these screenshots

Global permissions

Project Roles

Odd reference to a group that I am no longer using

nowhere is the group service-desk-agents referenced but it still shows in the red text box in the image above.

Is this the case?  Are there unchangeable defaults?  Is there a way to change them?

Seems very limited to not allow me to change stuff so that its organised in a more logical way.

I want to delete all the old config, but I wont be able to unless I am clear that I am not going to break any of it.

[Andy Heinzer]

Sorry, I don't see any screenshots in this post.

You should be able to create brand new groups with your own selected names and use these throughout JIRA.   There should not be any hardcoded group names in JIRA, just defaults.

The service-desk-agents group is only created by default when you first install the JIRA Service Desk plugin.  If you're no longer using that plugin, then you likely don't have need for that group.  But if that add-on is still installed, you won't be able to remove that group until you define a replacement group to grant application access to Service Desk. 

If you are in JIRA 7 you will need to go to Cog Icon -> Applications -> Application Access and there you first need to add another group there that contains the actualy Service Desk Agent accounts, otherwise those users won't be able to use that component within JIRA

I suspect that you also are unable to delete defaults like 'jira-administrators' or other group names that are currently assigned a specific project role or to a global permission level.   This is by design so that JIRA won't be broken by this change.   This kind of change is easier to do in a new install of JIRA because there are no projects yet.  But it is not impossible to do with an existing system.   You will likely have to go to each project on the system and replace each role you find defined with a group name you want to delete and then replace that group with your new group name there before you can then delete that group from JIRA.Also you might have to look through the Project Permission schemes to see if anyone defined a specific group to have a permission.  If so, you would have to remove that before deleting the group.