How to add Trello to the existing suite of JIRA and Confluence

[Shalabh Gandhi]

My company already has JIRA and Confluence , we need to try out Trello as well. To start with my need is to onboard around 15 users on it and try the product. 

How do I go about it? When I go to the existing Billings tab of JIRA (I have org admin privileges), all I see at the bottom on the page is Visit Trello Link -

 https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/invoices-and-receipts-for-your-trello-subscription/

After visiting the link what are the next steps am suppose to do ?

[Lara]

Hi Shalabh,

Thanks for reaching out!

Right now, Trello is billed as a separate product and to access the billing interface, you'll need to sign up for Trello and set it up there.

If you'd like to get started, please sign up for Trello to create a Workspace and invite your colleagues.

Let us know how that goes!

[Shalabh Gandhi]

Ok so I invited my colleagues to join using their corporate email address and they received the invitation email , I have 3 questions around it -

1. After clicking "Go to Workspace" , they are asked to Sign-in Or Login. Ideally there should only be "Login" option , since I have sent out an invitation to them to their corporate email address. So relevance of "Sign-in" option is only causing confusion in the minds of some of the employees. No? There should be no reason for them to use any other email address other than the corporate one? 

2. The Billing part has to be controlled by me as an admin, and the invitees should not be seeing it. However what's happening is even they can go to the left side panel where billing appears and have access to the credit card section . Is this normal ? How can this be controlled.

3. And the fact that I have invited them via my workspace. What exactly does that mean? Why does the invite says "Shalabh invited to their workspace" I am not the user of this application, it's only for the team. I just wanna make sure there is no dependency on me, other than managing it at a account level/Billing etc,

thanks

Shalabh

[Nils Geylen]

Hi, chiming in here as user and an admin of small team, Trello-only. I get that you're a long-time user of the other products and new to Trello?

What happens here, is while Trello is 'part of' Atlassian, it is still a very separate product, and it's also aimed at smaller collaborative 'groups of people' -- not necessarily a corporate-only setup.

1.

The platform does not know these people as 'Trello accounts' and needs to establish whether they already have one--regardless whether they have an Atlassian account, regardless of what mail domain they're on.

They might be on Trello already, personally, but (per Support Bot) "the presence of both options is intentional, as Trello needs to accommodate both new and existing users. It’s important that your colleagues use the same corporate email you invited them with, but the interface allows for both scenarios to ensure everyone can access the workspace."

This is a definite consequence of the decentralised, user-based and collaborative nature of Trello. Unless maybe on the Enterprise plan, people are not a member of an 'organisation' under Trello, but "free agents" who happen to be in workspaces. Those spaces can take different forms with some being personal, private, public--or highly professional and closed; but in a way each user's Trello is merely a 'grouping' of all of those.

Existing Atlassian product users might expect their colleagues to already be in "the system", i.e. your company server with all personnel assigned to products and roles, but it doesn't work that way with Trello.

Of course, in this case, your workspace is already limited to a particular email domain now, so that's good, and what will happen is, either

• they use a personal Trello account, will login and not see that space
• or they mistakenly create a personal Trello account, will find a new and empty personal workspace, but same as above
• they try with their work email, which will be recognised as an Atlassian account and now they also have a Trello work account and are part of your workspace
• [EDIT] some may already have set up "for work" trello with their company email; they will then have whatever workspace they already setup, plus this new one--both are unrelated.

When we 'onboard' people, we do try to 'train' them a bit before. Then, when they join, they may start as observers and then level up (that works for us) but even if they need to jump in as active users straightaway, it's good to take that easy; see 2. also.

What you can do from the start is 

• email them ahead with some background
• paste a short introductory text in the invite field that practically orients them
• create an observer-only 'guidelines and onboarding board' you add them to first thing
• create board descriptions, which are per-board summaries of what they can expect or need to do on that board

I also advise you to set up a dedicated test account that you control (make that your current mail perhaps (see below) and experiment with inviting, adding, sharing with that 'test person', and see how things look at that end. That has been very enlightening for me working with observers a lot: what do they see?

2.

From Atlassian bot: "By default, all Workspace admins control billing, but all Workspace members can see the billing section in the sidebar. This is normal behavior for Trello Standard and Premium workspaces. However, only admins can make changes."

This is a long-time issue I also frown upon; Trello workspace admins ought to have some additional higher-level administrative tier really, like a super-admin, but because it's not structured in that organisational sense like other Atlassian products, that is not available right now.

I think what you need in this scenario is: 'you' remain workspace admin (but see below) and you entrust one or two higher level colleagues from that batch of fifteen to have the same role.

Additionally, a few people might be workspace members, but (maybe for now) the preferred solution here would be most day-to-day users of the product ought to really be only guests to the space; they can be on different boards, as observers, as members or, as board admins even, if they need that front facing control.

For that to work you do need to familiarise yourself with the workspace settings, the user roles and what rights certain tiers have to administer space and board settings. You then need to set those workspace settings so they match your expectations and company policies (like who can create what boards, who can add or remove etc.) Then, your board admins can take it from there.

It all depends on who those initial fifteen people are and what they are expected to do, and what your intentions are in the future.

But again, this is a longstanding legacy issue of how Trello was created by Fog Creek in 2011 (open, low-level egalitarian almost) and how Atlassian came in as a more corporate, hierarchical, server oriented system and the two still remain very siloed after 8 years.

3.

That email says account x “invited you to their workspace” because "you (as the inviter) are an admin or owner of that workspace. This does not mean your team is dependent on you for daily use—your role is primarily administrative (managing users, billing, and settings). You can also promote other members to admin status if you want to share or delegate these responsibilities."

That too reflects the personal use of Trello.

If you'd like to 'professionalise' this, you could create a company mailbox, like trello-admin@company dot something, make that the "main" admin (which you then control but is owned by the company--regardless who perhaps gets that responsibility at a later time) and have your other trusted admin(s) to take care of the other workspace related handling. This is also a good failsafe measure for the company to have a main login stored somewhere. 

I get this is a very different approach to higher level software we are sometimes used to, and while I do crave a bit more control (esp. since a lot of our users are not technically minded and have no other collaboration suites experience) I do understand where this comes from, and tbh, Trello's 'simplicity' does have its advantages.

If this seems insufficient, because of company policies and security concerns and work demands, and if your company is looking at extending that fifteen users count, also look into Enterprise perhaps. We're way too small for that so I don't have it, but it seems to accommodate some of these corporate particulars more.

Once things are setup, Trello does kind of 'manage itself' on a daily basis precisely because it is really not that complicated an environment.

Long story, but hope it clarifies.