Multiple sites under one domain?

[Thomas Sawyer]

Greetings,

As a large university, we have a single domain that manages users. We have a team of professors that want to use a number of our Confluences licenses, which is not a problem. However, they want to use their own site (yyyyy.atlassian.net) vs. creating a space under our main university URL (xxxxx.atlassian.net). 

A few questions:
1) Can they do this?

2) Is it advised they do this? 

3) As site admin for the primary site, without joining their site, I'd have no visibility into their site activities, correct? 

TIA!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

1) Yes, they can do this.

2) Advised is hard to say. 

It depends on how your organisation wants to work.  You could let them be totally independent and do it all themselves (including having their own owners, admins and bill payers), or you could take them fully into the organisation and support them with your existing people.   Or somewhere between.   

I don't think we can tell you how your organisation wants to work!

3) Correct, but they could make you the site admin (and owner, and billable person) or just a user of their site or an admin.

I suspect it would be best to add the new site to your university one, so the user admin and billing is all in one place, but I can't be sure.

Edit - oh, I forgot - the professor's accounts on their separate system will have to be paid for separately for the other system.  Their access to your main site doesn't give them access to other sites, the site subscriptions are separate things.  (Unless you go up to Enterprise licencing)

[Thomas Sawyer]

Thank you for the response. For the billing, we (central IT) have x licenses. Their college (engineering) will pay us to use whatever number of licenses. One thing I need to ask is the sensitivity of their work. They may not want only their research group to have any access. 

If they went on their own, I don't think it'll be a problem because we'll pay the overall bill, but separately charge them for the licenses/duration.  On the admin side, I'm not sure thy are experienced Confluence users, so I'll have to ask about their ability to manage the site. Stay tuned and thank you again. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sensitivity might not be a problem - it is possible to isolate Confluence content by spaces - for example team A can see spaces 1, 2, 3 and 4, and team B can see spaces 2 and 5.  It's not complete multi-tenancy, some stuff will be shared (including lists of users), but you can hide content from different teams.

I'd definitely check the "who is paying for your second system and second set of accounts to use it" billing,  but yes, start with the question of if they want their own admins or not!

[Thomas Sawyer]

Thank you everyone. Atlassian came back and basically said what was posted here. No licenses shared across different instances. If this professor wants to use his own instance, then his college would have to essentially establish its own relationship with Atlassian as they would be a separate entity. Thanks again all. 

[Bill Bailey]

There is not a way for them to both share your licenses and also be on a separate site. They could have a subdomain that redirects to their space to facilitate access, but it would a part of your main Confluence site.