Maintaining the entire user management lifecycle is an essential task for Jira and Confluence administrators. Yet, when done manually, it becomes a tedious and time-consuming process. However, there is a way to make the whole process more efficient. Introducing to you, automated user management! Within this blog post, Atlassian Consultant at DEMICON, André Lehmann, will go through why he implemented this process internally, as well as the main advantages of automating the User Management lifecycle.
When all internal consultants, both local or remote, have administration permissions, it causes quite the headache, as André experienced when he first joined DEMICON. While the freedom to create new workspaces within Confluence allowed consultants to manage their clients independently, a range of issues would present themselves - from misaligned naming structures to inactive user accounts remaining dormant within the local User Directory. Not optimal for a company scaling rapidly.
André knew that to make User Management run as efficiently as possible, there needed to be some restructuring of the current approach. The aim was to reduce the number of administration permissions and have better overall control of users. So, the new solution was to maintain a central User Management system and a Central User Directory with one simple process. Now, consultants only have to raise requests at the Central Service Desk, giving consultants more time to focus on their work without the additional burden of needing to be hands-on with User Management.
The main concern was to give consultants access to their customer accounts within Confluence to communicate and collaborate with their customers, without being blocked if user accounts needed to be created or amended. To do this, André optimized the User Management lifecycle by creating scripts, turning what was once a manual task into a fully automated process.
"Once automation was in place, the amount of time saved was noticeable. When the process was manual, it could take up to thirty minutes per task! When you add up how many users you have to create a month, week, or a year, that's a lot of time saved.
Automation of User Management also brings additional security benefits. You can add an archive date and end date to accounts. This way, you don't need to go through the Central User Directory and manually clean up inactive accounts.
We have several Request forms allowing the team to raise their specific use case. This can be anything from the standard onboarding of new customers or new employees to switching interns or project teams, adding permissions, or offboarding.
For every use case, we wrote a script that 'asks' Jira for new Requests and then executes all needed actions and closes the Jira issue.
The only edge case would be if there were special characters within the names of clients or employees, which would transfer to the username and cause errors. We'd have to fix that manually. The beauty of automation is that it flags errors and puts them in a 'Need Review' status. Here, we can then go in, fix them, and hand them back over to the automation.
Our scripts run automatically hourly so that there is no long delay between raising and fulfilling requests.
Some days ago, I saw a colleague raising an issue one minute before the automation started, so there was a 'time to resolution' of two minutes. If I had done that manually, it would have taken longer to create the account, grant all permissions, and synchronize that new user to all applications.
It was reassuring knowing that the User Management lifecycle now had an efficient process. If there's a way to automate User Management, we really recommend doing so."
Automating User Management is a tried and tested process that makes any company more agile, security conscious and significantly drives down costs. Here's a quick recap of a few of the benefits when you automate your User Management lifecycle:
At DEMICON, we have years of tried and tested experience automatizing User Management in Jira and Confluence, and we’d love to help you. Please contact us to see how we can help with automation and improve User Management within your business.